How to Pick a Language • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Pick a Language

#71

Post by jballanc » Sat, Jan 24, 2009, 3:18 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #68

jballanc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then people are conflating notions of type-system/runtime/vm/etc. with the notion of script vs. program. The key distinction is this: In a programming language you can only have one entry point (the "main()" function), regardless of how the individual files are linked. In a scripting language the entry point depends on which file the interpreter starts with, and the execution model can change depending on ho…

This is a different distinction than the one the other poster reported that Matz proposes, but it's not useful either. You can do it in C, even without using the preprocessor; see http://gist.github.com/51416 , which does it with weak symbols. Worse, whether C is a "scripting language" or not depends only on the presence or absence of such trivial features. Your distinction would make Java a "scripting language," bec…

So, I think you're focusing too much on the specific example and not enough on the runtime distinction. The C runtime looks for "main()". If you trick it into looking in different places for it, that's a trick. Ruby (and other scripting languages) goes through the source file sequentially, executing statements and definitions as it goes. There isn't a specific symbol for it to look for. (Well, there is, but that just complicates matters.) The point I'm trying to make is that the distinction between scripting language and programming language shouldn't rely on how it's used, but rather on how it's formatted.

...and by the way, I would consider x86 assembly a scripting language. You're just scripting out the processor's actions...

Re: How to Pick a Language

#72

Post by kragen » Sat, Jan 24, 2009, 11:51 PM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #71

kragen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a different distinction than the one the other poster reported that Matz proposes, but it's not useful either. You can do it in C, even without using the preprocessor; see http://gist.github.com/51416 , which does it with weak symbols. Worse, whether C is a "scripting language" or not depends only on the presence or absence of such trivial features. Your distinction would make Java a "scripting language," bec…

So, I think you're focusing too much on the specific example and not enough on the runtime distinction. The C runtime looks for "main()". If you trick it into looking in different places for it, that's a trick. Ruby (and other scripting languages) goes through the source file sequentially, executing statements and definitions as it goes. There isn't a specific symbol for it to look for. (Well, there is, but that just…

I can't prevent you from using that definition of "scripting language" but I don't think it has much in common with the usual meaning of the term.

Re: How to Pick a Language

#73

Post by igouy » Mon, Jan 26, 2009, 5:50 PM UTC

catch23 wrote: post #39

alecco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love it or hate it, Javascript: * Is the language having the most important performance gains lately. * Growing support from both corporate (Yahoo, Apple, Google) and free software (Mozilla) camps. * Gains market with HTML 5 (just the canvas element alone makes a huge difference for JS based software.) * Better frameworks for both UI and client-server software. It's funny how things turn.

Yeah, it's strange how only 2 years ago or so, both ruby and javascript scored rock bottom on Alioth Shootout, with javascript scoring 4 times slower than ruby, and ruby 3 times slower than python. Two years later and there's 7 interpreters for ruby and 4 for javascript.

> ... rock bottom on Alioth Shootout ... Two years later ...

Are they still rock bottom?