41–50 of 126 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last I checked, Racket literally has sublanguages defined for teaching and learning: "Beginning Student", "Beginning Student with List Abbreviations", etc. https://docs.racket-lang.org/htdp-langs/index.html
Indeed. You can even MAKE your own language with Racket to suite teaching needs.
? show (map [[x y] [output se :x sum :y #]] [a b c] [10 20 30])
[[a 11] [b 22] [c 33]]
I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…
> recompile on error and continue I'm not familiar with this. Anyone care to explain?
That's a good example. When an error is signaled you're able to modify the program (via recompilation of functions, changing of values) and restart at a point you select. There are other things you can do, but this is a particularly powerful option.
After programming for 20 years, I've noticed that programmers are aware of the potential benefits of any abstraction that they have internalized, and blithely unaware of the costs. Because, having climbed that learning curve, it is now free to them. The result is that programmers introduce complexity lightly, and when they walk into a new language/organization/etc are inclined to add random abstractions that they are…
Like real language, you probably prefer certain idioms, you have your own style and you know certain words better than others. This is similar to how we program, we know certain algorithms, yet are oblivious to others, we have our favorite abstractions and have our etc.
There are downsides to these habits for both spoken language and computer programming languages, no doubt, you can get stuck in a rabbit hole without seeing you're in one. In the end, a similar approach works for both, read and write widely if you want to be great at these, meet different groups, work on uncomfortable projects, you know the drill.
Just like how you expand your language and therefore your world; socially.
I kind of wish there was a lisp with the "recompile on error and continue" feature of Common Lisp but without a massive standard library. A standalone SBCL program seems to be around 40MB at minimum. It feels like it would be doable if only CL wasn't designed with the kitchen sink included. Recently I've gotten into Janet[0] and really like the language, although I do miss CL's recompilation magic at times. It feels…
Why not just use a smarter compiler/linker that trims out unused library code?
I feel like this is the real success of Python: the "one and preferably only one obvious way to do it" idea means that new ways of doing something are rarely added, and when new they are added, old ones are likely deprecated. Complain all you want about the 2 to 3 transition, but it's resulted in a simpler, easier-to-use language. If the community really feels a different way is better, they add it in libraries. My o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common lisp is large-ish at least.
Common Lisp is small enough that one person could write a reasonably complete test suite for it in his spare time.
The Algol, Smalltalk, Pascal, and early Scheme languages were prized for being small and beautiful. Those languages are also not very popular at all today. Perhaps "small and beautiful" are not the right metrics to optimize programming languages for. In many ways, keeping the core JavaScript language small has led to the JavaScript ecosystem being too large and sprawling. For example, look at module importing, someth…
But yet, C (arguably 'current algol') and Python (arguably 'current scheme') are..
yes: python is verry loosely like scheme, this is meant in the sense of a 'dynamic loosely typed language you can interact with in a repl'
The Algol, Smalltalk, Pascal, and early Scheme languages were prized for being small and beautiful. Those languages are also not very popular at all today. Perhaps "small and beautiful" are not the right metrics to optimize programming languages for. In many ways, keeping the core JavaScript language small has led to the JavaScript ecosystem being too large and sprawling. For example, look at module importing, someth…
> Those languages are also not very popular at all today. But yet, C (arguably 'current algol') and Python (arguably 'current scheme' ) are.. yes: python is verry loosely like scheme, this is meant in the sense of a 'dynamic loosely typed language you can interact with in a repl'
Both Python and Scheme are dynamic but strongly typed.
Isn't c++ a large language? And yet it's still used.
For example, consider the new for loop syntax
for (auto item: a().b().c()) ...