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The perfect programming language

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Re: The perfect programming language

#101

Post by tluyben2 »

scottlocklin wrote: post #46
tluyben2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The relevant part of k \h can be put on one side of a postcard.

APLs are such a different paradigm from the run of the mill stuff ... “APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.” -Dijkstra

I think he is rolling over in his grave as JS is what he actually describes there and most of the world are coding bums now (learn JS in 1 hour, create undisciplined misery the rest of your 'career'; something Dijkstra, and his pupils, are vehemently against, yet 99% of people do now and it is considered ok as 'getting shit done', nevermind the reactor meltdowns it causes).

Re: The perfect programming language

#102

Post by pjmlp »

zyxzevn wrote: post #69

For fun: The purrfect programming language is C@ - http://www.reddit.com/r/C_AT

Actually AT&T did create a language for networked systems, cleverly named C@+, or C+@, don't recall the name properly.

Dr. Dobbs Journal had an article about it, back in the 90's when they run a piece of possible C++ replacements.

If I dig out my archive I can post the information as reply later on.

Re: The perfect programming language

#104

Post by pjmlp »

capableweb wrote: post #88
thekingofh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think of the reliance on the JVM? I've tended to shy away from using it.

JVM can be kinda neat if you're doing server deployments and might use different languages like Kotlin, Java, Clojure and jRuby, as the deployments are mostly the same and same inspection tools can be used for the runtime. However, doing CLIs or binaries for whatever reason, then it wouldn't be so neat. Ruby wouldn't either, but GraalVM might be able to provide something good for it in the future as well.

You could always compile Java to straight native code since the early 2000's, just not for free.

Re: The perfect programming language

#105

Post by michelpp »

irishsultan wrote: post #36
michelpp wrote: post #12

> I used to have a copy of "SQL for Dummies" at hand whenever I, with dread in my heart, needed to write some SQL, especially if there was any funky stuff like joins and such going on. SQL isn't so much a programming language as a query language. It never claims to be an efficient way to write a factorial function. And why do people freak out when they see a JOIN? It's one of the simplest concepts in databases: inter…

> And why do people freak out when they see a JOIN? It's one of the simplest concepts in databases: intersecting two sets. Everything in column A that matches everything in column B. Actually no, that's not what a join is. A join is a cartesian product (not an intersection), followed by a WHERE clause (which doesn't have to be an exact match of a value between columns). This is further complicated by outer joins wher…

Only a CROSS join is a Cartesian product which is rarely used.

Re: The perfect programming language

#106

Post by gmueckl »

kick wrote: post #91
gmueckl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it was the blatant rejection of C++ without any further discussion. C++ has a lot of baggage from C, but it also sports powerful metaprogramming, even though that is flawed (the necessity of SFINAE speaks volumes...). There are newer languages that improve on that a lot. The author doesn't even care to mention them by name. To me, it is pretty clear that the author has a very specific world view, probably defi…

You just acknowledged that C++ was not the perfect programming language in your (rather biased for it) comment.

That is not what I wrote. Dismissing C++ summarily as this article does skips over a few points that are worth talking about. Generics and templates are not discussed. Memory management approaches of different languages are not discussed. The world of programming languages is huge. The author seems to ignore most of it, yet claims to search for a "perfect language" while clinging to the nonsensical illusion that a single languagecan be perfect forall use cases.

Re: The perfect programming language

#107

Post by TheRealKing »

atilaneves wrote: post #50

> but as soon as you enter a physics-institution anywhere in the world, FORTRAN likely reigns supreme Not at CERN, but it used to be the case. It's C++ now. > It turns out that FORTRAN is a very good match for the way physicists think about their work I don't even know what this means and I have a PhD in Physics. > You simply specify what fields you have and what pattern they are written in and the computer takes car…

interesting, I am a physicist and I use (modern 2018 standard) Fortran on a daily basis, the reason being that it perfectly suits my research needs, in particular, for its concise vectorized array-based syntax. For example, to compute the statistical mean of a weighted sample of points, represented by the two vectors Weight and Point, I'd do,

mean = sum(Weight*Point) / sum(Weight)

where sum() is an intrinsic Fortran function. I am curious to know how this computation would be done in C++?

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