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Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

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Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#41

Post by robrenaud »

3pt14159 wrote: post #2

(Note: This article, while good, is from 2007 so perhaps its advice is slightly out of date.) Personally, if I were going in completely blind I'd choose Python (with C as a backup). Numpy and Scipy are fast enough for most of the things that you need to do. It's the "it does pretty much everything" language. Is it great at very high performance games? No. But you can drop into C pretty easily (although I find Ruby +…

What projects on the scale/complexity of Photoshop are implemented in Python? Possibly large chunks of Youtube or Dropbox?

I love Python for small scripts, and even don't regret it too much for programs with mild complexity (~5000 lines of Python), but the lack of explicit typing makes figuring out what any given function/class does pretty hard. What are the arguments? What do they do? What does the return type do? Where is this thing initialized? Finding the answers to those kinds of questions are greatly aided by an IDE/source code browsing that is anchored by types.

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#42

Post by im3w1l »

>What would you do? And if a hundred million dollars changes your approach to getting things done in a quick and reliable fashion, then why isn't it your standard approach?

Ordinarily you try to strike a balance between "exploration and exploitation". For a small project where success isn't that hugely important, the learning that a less conservative choice offers can be more heavily weighted.

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#43

Post by lomnakkus »

username223 wrote: post #40
lomnakkus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One potential objection I see (aside from the ones raised by others in this thread) is that C isn't actually that great as a compile target. Aliasing analysis is extremely hard in C (thus preventing obvious optimizations), you'd still have to implement your own GC on top of C, C doesn't do tail-call optimization so you'd have to do your own CPS transform anyway... at which point most of the advantages evaporate. (If…

> C isn't actually that great as a compile target. That's not the point. C is a great common tongue, as its function call and name lookup semantics are simple, and it doesn't insist on being in control of memory, scheduling, etc. Perl and Python are pretty similar, and both talk to C, but calling between Perl and Python is enough of an unholy mess that it's usually easier to just print text over a pipe.

> That's not the point.

Maybe not, but did you miss the bit in my post about FFI and GC? Have you actually tried to implement a non-trivial extension to a GC'ed language which needed to interface with C code?

EDIT: The point is not so much that it cannot be done -- the point is that it needs a human ("programmer") to do it. Which kind of defeats the point of "C-as-lingua-franca". Which, if you think about it C already kind of is, sadly. Any FFI currently in existence focuses on C already. What more do you want? ;)

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#44

Post by Ixiaus »

Caveat before reading my comment: this article is from 2007 and the scene 8 years later is pretty different but the spirit still holds, I think. The author also specifically placed "pet programming language" in the article's title which makes my reaction to it a bit unsound since, for example, Haskell is not a "pet programming language".

WhatsApp built a 19B product on-top of Erlang. I'm building our startup's product on a mix of Haskell and Erlang; so far it's going well.

There's pessimism in this article that neglects to acknowledge adaptability. I agree to a degree with the thought that if I chose to build our product on-top of Idris I would be spending more time building tooling and dealing with immature parts of the language than I would actually building the product.

This is not the case with Haskell and other innovative but mature languages / platforms. Once at a certain size we may need to train programmers or develop some tooling internally but I see that happening even with Java and C++.

If you can boot up the product with the language / platform effectively and quickly, it's good enough to tackle a 100M product and adaptability can take care of the long-tail.

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#45

Post by codygman »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
jeremyjh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people always say that. How many full-stack web frameworks are there that use idiomatic F#? Haskell has at least three that were mature three years ago and still under active development. In general the .NET open-source ecosystem is weak; enterprise just waits for Microsoft to reveal the One True Way or spends thousands per seat on clunky tool-kits. That same enterprise will use hundreds of open-sour…

Which Haskell libraries interoperate with classical enterprise stacks, alongside existing code?

It depends on how you define interoperate. The way you phrase this it sounds like the only answer is the JVM. In which case:

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/java-bridge

However in the case where there is a lot of prior Java code, it might be easier to look at Scala or even Clojure.

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#46

Post by spc476 »

lmm wrote: post #31
dietrichepp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write reliable programs in C. How about a successful $2.5 billion mission to Mars with 500,000 lines of C? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-i... There are a lot of tools available for the design of reliable systems in C. Valgrind is just the beginning. A lot of smart people have put an enormous amount of effort into static and dynamic checkers and theorem provers, as well as standard…

At the point where you're using a theorem prover you're not really writing C any more (I mean, do you count ATS as writing C?). It's a perfectly good way to produce reliable code, sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not what the article is advocating. > And then, as ill as you speak of C, you turn around and plug your Java systems into C systems, such as Varnish, Nginx, Apache, PostgreSQL, or thousands others that you use…

Erlang is written in C, and the latest version is 456,000 lines of C. You might want to double think your reliance on such unstable technology.

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#47

Post by comment38296 »

is the quality of HN commenters going down, perhaps?

1.) It's about strategy. re-read Sun Tze, Art of Strategy (and avoiding war). The title is amistranslation cleverly designed to fool non-native LANGUAGE cunning linguists. - english joke - cunn ing lin gui st - end joek.

2.) those who armed welll with the RIGHT language, did not need to fight or program well. that's why Haskell or Ocaml is at the 2nd stage.

3.) But it AINT COQ or provable...LANGUAGE.

4.) what's the second point U missed? Yes, the weak spot is "inter-team dependency" - ref: mathattack post. Yes, the ??? is true and necessary.

BUT THE CONDIITION is NOT SUFFICIENT for AI or artificial intelligence.

8.) so what is the closest to ai. Seems to me prolog, but darn... most of the obscure conferences are in japanese....language barrier.

9.) We conclude the 'lesson of the day" by quote: nbardy: "client wants their project done on time and on budget along with the ability to change direction"

So, THE CLIENT wants it FREE, Yesterday (get the time machine working) and High quality and CHANGEABLE - agilie.

Yes, of course, as long as you pay up front, I THE VENDOR guarantees ALL FOUR ASPECTS in the 'game.'

No wonder, the track record of software is so BAD compared to engineering, building of the Pyramids in Egypt, farming using bio-dynamic techniques, other human endeavor - spacecraft.

addendum: fun note: just simply download basic OPEN SOURCE that includes libressl, openssl, gettext GNU, etc.

SOME OF IT DONT WORK, at least on basic systems.

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#48

Post by dietrichepp »

lmm wrote: post #31
dietrichepp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write reliable programs in C. How about a successful $2.5 billion mission to Mars with 500,000 lines of C? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-i... There are a lot of tools available for the design of reliable systems in C. Valgrind is just the beginning. A lot of smart people have put an enormous amount of effort into static and dynamic checkers and theorem provers, as well as standard…

At the point where you're using a theorem prover you're not really writing C any more (I mean, do you count ATS as writing C?). It's a perfectly good way to produce reliable code, sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not what the article is advocating. > And then, as ill as you speak of C, you turn around and plug your Java systems into C systems, such as Varnish, Nginx, Apache, PostgreSQL, or thousands others that you use…

I'm just taking two lines from the article: "Reliability and proven tools are even more important than libraries"... in this case, there are a lot of proven tools for writing C programs, including the theorem provers. And "You're more dependent on the decisions made by the language implementers than you think"... there have been a lot of flaws in the JRE over time, most of them from the parts of the JRE that are written in C. If you had been writing in C, you could have avoided those flaws if you were in the top 2% most diligent and careful C programmers, because the C tools are rock solid, whereas Java tools haven't been (January 2013 is still pretty recent).

Problems in libraries, such as heartbleed, can be mitigated in C using the same tools that you'd use in Java. Process isolation is great.

Of course, if you are writing your web app in C then I am going to replace you with someone else. But the web is not everything.

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#49

Post by gpfault »

lmm wrote: post #5

I was nodding along until I realized that the author has a very different notion of esoteric from mine. The last month of Fridays I've been tinkering with Idris, trying to get it to... well, do anything useful. I'd heard it was a dependently typed JVM language, which it is... kinda. Turns out you need to install a full Haskell toolchain to do anything with it. With the right esoteric option incantation, you can make…

By that logic, you should probably stop programming altogether because all runtime of managed languages is written in C. What if it all comes crashing down?!

Re: Would You Bet $100M on Your Pet Programming Language? (2007)

#50

Post by sheetjs »

Ixiaus wrote: post #44

Caveat before reading my comment: this article is from 2007 and the scene 8 years later is pretty different but the spirit still holds, I think. The author also specifically placed "pet programming language" in the article's title which makes my reaction to it a bit unsound since, for example, Haskell is not a "pet programming language". WhatsApp built a 19B product on-top of Erlang. I'm building our startup's produc…

It's funny you mention WhatsApp and Erlang, because the article actually addresses that point:

> You're more dependent on the decisions made by the language implementers than you think ... some odd case that didn't matter at all for the problem domain the language was created for

The language implementers (employee of Ericsson) made design decisions based on telecom constraints, exactly the same constraints faced by WhatsApp and other messaging systems. In the parlance of the article, WA is in Erlang's problem domain, so a strict interpretation of the author's words would have him agreeing with WhatsApp here

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