11–20 of 126 posts
Students grumble at having to learn such an esoteric language; the justification of the professor is that it's simpler and more focussed than Haskell and so better for teaching functional concepts. This may be true but perhaps he's just been teaching the same material for decades and doesn't want to update it.
Miranda is still taught as a language for University College London's Functional Programming course: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/module-catalogue/modules/functional-pr... Students grumble at having to learn such an esoteric language; the justification of the professor is that it's simpler and more focussed than Haskell and so better for teaching functional concepts. This may be true but perhaps he's just been teaching the…
You've at least heard of (if not used) a programming language heavily inspired by Miranda: Haskell. A lot of things about Miranda were really interesting; it reflects modern languages in some ways, but looks completely foreign in other ways. Like Haskell, whitespace was significant; unlike Haskell, it was fast. Really fast. It was one of the pioneering purely-functional languages, but seems to have been mostly forgot…
The language was such a pleasure to use in university in the early 90’s. Those were the days where you paid for compilers. My prof was grumbling about the licensing fees for Miranda though.
You've at least heard of (if not used) a programming language heavily inspired by Miranda: Haskell. A lot of things about Miranda were really interesting; it reflects modern languages in some ways, but looks completely foreign in other ways. Like Haskell, whitespace was significant; unlike Haskell, it was fast. Really fast. It was one of the pioneering purely-functional languages, but seems to have been mostly forgot…
how come it was so much faster ? smaller semantics allowing for more optimizations ? or some obscure reason ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how come it was so much faster ? smaller semantics allowing for more optimizations ? or some obscure reason ?
Short: Haskell made a bunch of poor design decisions that they've since doubled down on, the fastest implementation isn't very good, the art of writing compilers and interpreters has effectively been lost, and Miranda was written by and designed by professionals.
I'm curious, how does that happen? Were the techniques used in compilers and interpreters of yore never recorded for posterity in academic papers or technical documentation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how come it was so much faster ? smaller semantics allowing for more optimizations ? or some obscure reason ?
Short: Haskell made a bunch of poor design decisions that they've since doubled down on, the fastest implementation isn't very good, the art of writing compilers and interpreters has effectively been lost, and Miranda was written by and designed by professionals.
Which was not such a bad idea: I had three years of C & five of C++ under my belt already at the time but never touched a functional programming language.
Very few co-students had worked with Lisp and they did have an advantage. But they still had to new learn a new language.
Trivia 1: I was going out with a German-Iranian girl who's name was Miranda, at the same time.
Trivia 2: As I was also studying graphics design with an emphasis on typography then I made her a t-shirt for her b-day that used the 'Mirinda'[1] logo but turned it into 'Miranda'. She never wore it which hurt me a bit at the time. Maybe I should dig that out and donate it as the logo for that language since theirs is an absolute eyesaw? :]
[1] Mirinda is a carbonated soft drink (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirinda) The logo in the 90's looked different -- like this: http://tiny.cc/24rnkz
Back in the 90s I remember taking a course that used Simple ML. I was pretty amazed by it's elegant syntax, and If I remember it correctly, it was either based on, or related to Miranda. I haven't really used a functional language since university. But would love to try one again. Whats worth checking out? I know nothing. Anything I can use to make a website or an interesting project within a week of learning.