The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
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The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
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Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#2If you want a programming language for which parsing is trivial, code is stored in a pre-tokenized manner and there is a direct correspondence between tokens and machine primitives, Chuck Moore's ColorForth[1] foots the bill. It's orders of magnitude simpler than what most of us would consider a programming language, but you can still build powerful abstractions and extend the language to add features like garbage collection, type systems[2] (not built in the same dialect of Forth, but you get the idea) and so on.
[1] http://www.colorforth.com/cf.htm [2] http://home.vrweb.de/stephan.becher/forth/
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#3%s/Chromsky/Chomsky/g
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#4This article is nonsense. The author is belittling pretty much everything that has been achieved in computer science over the past decades without provide any examples or theories as to what could be done better.
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#5%s/Chromsky/Chomsky/g
Thank you. I was annoyed that someone who wants us to take his writing about language and programming languages seriously couldn't even spell Chomsky's name right.
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#6This article seems to be also proposing... a programming language. Or at least "environment". Visual programming is something people have proposed, as is interactive manipulation of an "actual" parse state, as with some of the Smalltalk environments. But then you still have different choices of abstractions, like what object model you use, or what concurrency model. I don't think you can avoid that by renaming it from "language".
You could program in raw machine code, then sure, no separate language, "just" instructions for the computer. But then each machine has a different... language, too.
Or you could program in "pure mathematics", expressions, etc., but then you have a choice of which formalism to use for that. I doubt there will be only one.
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#7"the only difference between a Java programmer and a C# programmer is that they use somewhat different keywords and have to program against a different run time library"
yeah well, most people spend their time combining libraries and making them interact with each other, so it is actually kind of a big difference.
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#8This article seems to be also proposing... a programming language. Or at least "environment". Visual programming is something people have proposed, as is interactive manipulation of an "actual" parse state, as with some of the Smalltalk environments. But then you still have different choices of abstractions, like what object model you use, or what concurrency model. I don't think you can avoid that by renaming it fro…
Yes. I am sure that most people who have tried to use a 'visual' programming environment to achieve anything non-trivial are relieved to get back to a text-based environment.
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#9It is clear that the author hasn't actually done any work on, or even deeply thought about, computer languages. Claiming that a whole field is misguided and hinting at a much superior approach without going into any details is a special form of trolling.
Re: The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language
#10"After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chromsky [sic] on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chromsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science."
Really? You couldn't proof-read long enough to notice two misspellings of the single most recognizable name in modern linguistics, and you want people to read your blog post on that same subject?