The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#1

Post by progga » Sat, May 12, 2012, 11:34 AM UTC

The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)
alan.dipert.org

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#2

Post by michaelochurch » Sat, May 12, 2012, 12:39 PM UTC

Unfortunately, much of the industry is still stuck in 1996 because, hey, IDEs take care of the boilerplate, so it's "free", right?

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#3

Post by ge0rg » Sat, May 12, 2012, 12:54 PM UTC

Fortunately, Java is "developing" with regard to its expressiveness.

Using Scala and co only brings you a part of the way, especially if you have to interact with Javaesque APIs like in Android, where you have dozens of different abstract classes (or sometimes interfaces) begging for anonymous inner classes.

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#4

Post by goodside » Sat, May 12, 2012, 1:21 PM UTC

This is a very specific selection. There are plenty of modern languages that don't use printf semantics or C-like syntax. Too, there's languages from the 80s and 90s that did: Python (1991), R (1993), and PHP (1995) come to mind for direct printf analogs.

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#5

Post by Jabbles » Sat, May 12, 2012, 1:21 PM UTC

Is the author related to this post made 4 days ago here on HN? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3942636

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#6

Post by SeanLuke » Sat, May 12, 2012, 1:35 PM UTC

I'm not sure what the point of this is. It seems pretty petty. To wit, we could have just we well written...

    MACLISP (1980):
    (format t "Week ~R of the ~:R month of the year ~:@R~%" 15 102 1996)
        --> Week fifteen of the one hundred second month of the year MDCCCCLXXXXVI

    C/C++/Java/Python/Ruby:
    ...uh...

    COMMON LISP:
    (format t "Week ~R of the ~:R month of the year ~:@R~%" 15 102 1996)
        --> Week fifteen of the one hundred second month of the year MDCCCCLXXXXVI

There are powerful print functions and then there are powerful print functions.

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#7

Post by warmfuzzykitten » Sat, May 12, 2012, 2:06 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #6

I'm not sure what the point of this is. It seems pretty petty. To wit, we could have just we well written... MACLISP (1980): (format t "Week ~R of the ~:R month of the year ~:@R~%" 15 102 1996) --> Week fifteen of the one hundred second month of the year MDCCCCLXXXXVI C/C++/Java/Python/Ruby: ...uh... COMMON LISP: (format t "Week ~R of the ~:R month of the year ~:@R~%" 15 102 1996) --> Week fifteen of the one hundred…

Where's your sense of humor? It was intended to be funny, and it was.

Of course, like all irony the glass is only half funny.

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#8

Post by Symmetry » Sat, May 12, 2012, 2:29 PM UTC

Jabbles wrote: post #5

Is the author related to this post made 4 days ago here on HN? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3942636

Both claim to have gotten it from http://www.horstmann.com/

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#9

Post by dons » Sat, May 12, 2012, 3:11 PM UTC

Hmm

      printf "%10.2f"

-- Haskell, 1990.

Re: The March of Progress (in programming language syntax :)

#10

Post by MBCook » Sat, May 12, 2012, 3:21 PM UTC

Heh. Cute.

As a Java programmer, I agree that NumberFormat looks ridiculous there. It's a lot of work for a single number to string conversion.

Luckily, since Java 5 there is a printf function:

    System.out.printf(...);