Miranda released as free software • Hacker News Board

Re: Miranda released as free software

#31

Post by Mathnerd314 » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #26

kick wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's right! Haskell is still stuck with most of the wrong decisions they made in '88, and it was intended as a (clunkier) Miranda clone, anyway.

> Haskell is still stuck with most of the wrong decisions they made in '88 Which ones?

:: for type signatures, for one; I think that came straight from Miranda.

Honestly though there weren't too many outright "mistakes", but some parts of Haskell have evolved significantly, for example the introduction of the IO monad and all the associated type classes, compared to the original based on infinite lazy lists.

Re: Miranda released as free software

#32

Post by chubot » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

Cool, looks like a pretty browsable/readable code. There's some apparently duplicate code in '/new/' I omitted.

    $ ls *.[chy] |  grep -v y.tab | xargs wc -l |sort -n
          3 version.c
          9 utf8.h
         21 fdate.c
         30 lex.h
         62 big.h
         88 utf8.c
        143 combs.h
        144 cmbnms.c
        295 just.c
        320 menudriver.c
        350 data.h
        656 big.c
       1000 trans.c
       1220 lex.c
       1315 data.c
       1674 types.c
       1689 rules.y
       2241 steer.c
       2394 reduce.c
      13654 total

Re: Miranda released as free software

#33

Post by voldacar » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

kick wrote: post #2

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…

Are there any more modern functional languages that are as fast or faster?

Re: Miranda released as free software

#34

Post by greydius » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

brmgb wrote: post #29

saagarjha wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Haskell is still stuck with most of the wrong decisions they made in '88 Which ones?

While I don't agree with the general snarkiness towards Haskell of the commenter you are replying to, being lazy by default could be seen as Haskell original mistake. It was interesting from a research point of view though.

Miranda is also lazy, so that can't be it.

Re: Miranda released as free software

#35

Post by slim » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

kryptiskt wrote: post #8

buckminster wrote: post #7

This could do with a 2010 label. Back in the day, Orwell was a free Miranda clone. So I used that.

The page has been updated recently, the 64-bit version was added this year. So it's actually the date on the page that is wrong.

that date seems to be the date "sitemeter" passed away

Re: Miranda released as free software

#36

Post by LessDmesg » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #30

I read the overview, cool language, very cool to see it open sourced, and just looking at the code it is clear how much it inspired Haskell. I started hacking (a lot!) this week on an experimental project in Swift. Swift is similar to Haskell and Miranda in supporting functional programming. I like Haskell’s syntax and in general REPL based Haskell development, so at first Swift’s syntax bugged me. However, when I se…

Swift is not similar to Haskell and Miranda. It's an imperative refcounted manually managed language with strict evaluation, while Haskell and Miranda are GCed languages with lazy evaluation and immutability. It's hard to find languages more different, really.

Re: Miranda released as free software

#37

Post by LessDmesg » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 5:40 AM UTC

Here's an idea I have: never close-source any programming language, make 'em free and open from day zero. Languages are not products, but infrastructure, like roads. They benefit and grow from the number of users, not from paywalls. Closed languages tend to fade into obscurity. That's why everyone knows Haskell and nobody knows Miranda, everyone knows Java and nobody Eiffel. I laughed when I read that the author of Shen/Qi changed the license from a commercial to a slightly more permissive one, when no one cares about his little language. Such conceit kills languages. Microsoft has realized this only recently with .NET, when the JVM was already miles ahead. Which is sad because the CLR is so much smarter than JVM.

Re: Miranda released as free software

#38

Post by kick » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

voldacar wrote: post #33

kick wrote: post #2

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…

Are there any more modern functional languages that are as fast or faster?

k, J & APL, in roughly that order.

Re: Miranda released as free software

#39

Post by voldacar » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 6:18 AM UTC

kick wrote: post #38

voldacar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any more modern functional languages that are as fast or faster?

k, J & APL, in roughly that order.

APL is cheating since all the magic happens in highly pipelined SIMD-heavy loops :p

but if it's really true that other than array languages, no modern FP language can outperform Miranda then that's really depressing.

I was under the impression that GHC attempted to generate decently good code, maybe it's all the little allocations that slow Haskell down or something like that.

Re: Miranda released as free software

#40

Post by rixed » Sat, Feb 29, 2020, 6:46 AM UTC

kick wrote: post #2

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…

Do you mean that the compiler was fast or that the generated programs were fast? Do we have a competitor for Clean?