41–50 of 145 posts
In case the author sees this: The indentation of the code samples is all over the place, making it quite hard to read. Even more so for a white-space sensitive language like Pony. Did you mix tabs and spaces?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first comma is simply incorrect. "unfortunately" does need commas around it, but it could be moved to the beginning for a simpler sentence. The fourth comma is also incorrect and should be replaced by a semicolon. "Unfortunately, the problem is that sometimes these tools are just not sufficient; it's still easy to shoot your own foot and get lost in a sea of complexity." And looking at that now, I would also get…
Just to aid people who are interesting in looking this sort of thing up, the fourth comma in the original is an example of a "comma splice", where the comma is too weak to join the two independent clauses. You can solve a comma splice by either making the two independent clauses into separate sentences, joining them with a stronger piece of punctuation (like a semicolon, colon, or a dash), or by using a conjunction l…
I have a, perhaps unjustified, concern at the loss of fear around things like concurrency. People keep substituting appeasing the compiler with actual thinking around hard problems. But until the halting problem is solved at a compiler level (at a level that can account for runtime cases), you should always have a healthy amount of fear when writing concurrent code. Fear, and respect, the absurdly difficult challenge…
I find this line of thinking to be a holdover from an earlier age. One could replace the word "concurrency" in the above comment with "memory safety" to express the popular sentiment as of the 1980s--but in the decades hence the vast, vast majority of programmers have come to be able to completely ignore concerns related to the careful management of allocating and deallocating memory, and though we can argue that the…
Assuming you know that none of the code in your concurrent blocks are is side-effecting, which may be hard to know if it's not your code; Haskell checks this for you, so to me it seems easier in haskell, not harder, because I don't have to hunt down and read all the source code to know if what I'm doing has concurrency bugs or not.
It has been supporting multiprocessor, multi-core, and multithreaded architectures for as long as it has been around. It has language constructs to make it really easy to develop, say, embedded parallel and real-time programs. It is such a breeze. I admit I am not quite sure what they are referring to by fearless, but if it means that they can handle concurrent programming safely and efficiently in a language, well, then Ada definitely has it.
Ada is successful in the domain of mission-critical software, which involves air traffic control systems, avionics, medical devices, railways, rockets, satellites, and so on.
Ada is one of the few programming languages to provide high-level operations to control and manipulate the registers and interrupts of input and output devices.
Ada has concurrency types, and its type system integrates concurrency (threading, parallelism) neatly. Protected types for data-based synchronization, and task types for concurrency. They of course can be unified through the use of interface inheritance, and so on.
If you are interested in building such programs, I recommend two books:
https://www.amazon.com/Building-Parallel-Embedded-Real-Time-...
https://www.amazon.com/Concurrent-Real-Time-Programming-Alan...
...other good resources:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Style_Guide/Concurrency
https://www.adacore.com/uploads/books/pdf/AdaCore-Tech-Cyber...
The last PDF will summarize in what ways Ada is awesome for:
- contract-based programming (with static analysis tools (formal verification, etc.))
- object-oriented programming
- concurrent programming
- systems programming
- real-time programming
- developing high-integrity systems
and a lot more. It also gives you a proper introduction to the language's features.
Sorry, I do not know any of these languages but I have used Haskell's STM which is incredible. Any of the languages mentioned here close to the STM idea (basically using strong types to ensure mutations happen in isolated context)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to aid people who are interesting in looking this sort of thing up, the fourth comma in the original is an example of a "comma splice", where the comma is too weak to join the two independent clauses. You can solve a comma splice by either making the two independent clauses into separate sentences, joining them with a stronger piece of punctuation (like a semicolon, colon, or a dash), or by using a conjunction l…
British English seems to be more forgiving about comma splices than American English. One certainly sees them much more frequently in British English.
I have a, perhaps unjustified, concern at the loss of fear around things like concurrency. People keep substituting appeasing the compiler with actual thinking around hard problems. But until the halting problem is solved at a compiler level (at a level that can account for runtime cases), you should always have a healthy amount of fear when writing concurrent code. Fear, and respect, the absurdly difficult challenge…
I find this line of thinking to be a holdover from an earlier age. One could replace the word "concurrency" in the above comment with "memory safety" to express the popular sentiment as of the 1980s--but in the decades hence the vast, vast majority of programmers have come to be able to completely ignore concerns related to the careful management of allocating and deallocating memory, and though we can argue that the…
People have stopped using Java and Go?
I am surprised it does not mention Ada. I really feel like that Ada is not getting enough attention, it definitely deserves more. Even if you have heard of the language before, please do check out some of the resources available, you will not regret it! It has been supporting multiprocessor, multi-core, and multithreaded architectures for as long as it has been around. It has language constructs to make it really eas…