experimenting with lua this evening. be curious to hear if others have had good/bad experiences with it.
Programming languages worth checking out
11–20 of 70 posts
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#12Hmm,
Nice to have all the up-and-coming languages lined-up in an internal comparison. I like Lua, Haskell and Io. I think that future languages will have to have a cleaner rather than an uglier look and syntax. For that reason, I have a visceral reaction to scala and factor. Even the one-line examples I've seen of these language have look like gibberish. I'm sure they are great in many ways but don't want them to succeed since they will make my brain hurt more. Also, I think that they won't succeed for similar reasons.
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#13I find Self to be worth checking out, as well (http://research.sun.com/self/) if for no other reason than seeing how fast dynamic languages can be. The research that went into it--techniques for blazing fast implementations of highly dynamic, object-oriented languages--has become especially relevant and provides the basis for many of the numerous new Javascript vms (especially V8).
With regards to Smalltalk and its incredible reflective abilities, this video from OOPSLA'08 ("Smalltalk Superpowers") is particularly amusing: http://www.veoh.com/videos/v163138695pJEMGmk. Unger even does a pretty neat demo of Self.
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I played with Io a long time (like 4 or 5 years) ago, at which time it didn't seem ready for anything serious. I would expect it's gotten much better since then. It would be interesting to know what sort of apps are easy to build in it. This author doesn't seem to know his subject very well, though. To say that an object-oriented, message-based, fully-reflective programming language goes "far beyond" Smalltalk sugges…
As I hinted in the article, you're right: I didn't really experiment much with Smalltalk. Does Smalltalk allow the same level of reflection? Does it offer the same "freedom" as Io? I'm asking because I _presume_ it does not, but I honestly don't know.
Smalltalk blocks are objects that respond to messages about themselves, so yes, Smalltalk offers the same kind of reflection, in fact it invented it. (It's possible that Io takes it further in some respect, but I'd need to see details.)
So which (if any) of all these languages will you use to do a real project?
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#1511. F#
F# is a mixture of C#, OCaml and Haskell. F# will be included in the next version of Visual Studio so it's no longer just a research language. Performance is similar to C# but coding in it is faster in my experience and above all a lot nicer if you like functional programming. Because it runs on the .NET VM or Mono VM it has good multicore support unlike OCaml. Haskell is more powerful as a language, but also has it's weak aspects. The main thing F# is missing imo in comparison to Haskell is type classes. And of course the Haskell community.
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I hinted in the article, you're right: I didn't really experiment much with Smalltalk. Does Smalltalk allow the same level of reflection? Does it offer the same "freedom" as Io? I'm asking because I _presume_ it does not, but I honestly don't know.
Smalltalk blocks are objects that respond to messages about themselves, so yes, Smalltalk offers the same kind of reflection, in fact it invented it. (It's possible that Io takes it further in some respect, but I'd need to see details.) So which (if any) of all these languages will you use to do a real project?
The very reason I wrote this article in the first place was that I couldn't make upmy mind. I am, as a matter of fact, interested in all of them: I was hoping you people could help me decide.
As a matter of fact, I work as a technical writer, so I'm not going to use any of these for any big project. However, I do code in my spare time and prepare small programs to automate tasks at work, when my boss lets me.
At the moment (literally) I'd like to try learning Haskell again, but it feels very difficult.
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
But common lisp does come with vectors (make-array), hashtables (make-hash-table), and set-operators (intersection, union, pushnew, etc) that work on lists. Also, Common Lisp (CLOS, in particular) supports multimethods (defmethod), contrary to what the author claims. And all of the special forms I saw in clojure have a counterpart in common lisp. In fact, a lot of common lisp implementations (I like SBCL) have suppor…
What's distinctive about Clojure is not that it has them, but rather that it makes them first-class citizens in the way that lists are - i.e. provides a universal set of operators for manipulating them (or so I hear anyway). This is certainly a weakness of CL. I think this is the original point underlying the author's garbled statement, and it's an improvement specifically to CL that has nothing to do with the presen…
That's very true. I personally like clojure - and it does provide a lot of potential advantages to common lisp. I just don't think the author of this article understands them - he's just spewing bs.
Hickey does make a lot of valid points about the advantages/differences of clojure (http://clojure.org/lisps) though.
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smalltalk blocks are objects that respond to messages about themselves, so yes, Smalltalk offers the same kind of reflection, in fact it invented it. (It's possible that Io takes it further in some respect, but I'd need to see details.) So which (if any) of all these languages will you use to do a real project?
The very reason I wrote this article in the first place was that I couldn't make upmy mind. I am, as a matter of fact, interested in all of them: I was hoping you people could help me decide. As a matter of fact, I work as a technical writer, so I'm not going to use any of these for any big project. However, I do code in my spare time and prepare small programs to automate tasks at work, when my boss lets me. At the…
I was hoping you people could help me decide.
You're likely to just get people recommending their favorite.
If I were you I'd apply some combination of two criteria: which is the most fun, and what do I want to try to build?
It's great that you've done some broad experimentation (much more than I have). I suggest that you'll get a different and rewarding view if you try to use one of these languages to do something real that you care about.
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#1911. F# F# is a mixture of C#, OCaml and Haskell. F# will be included in the next version of Visual Studio so it's no longer just a research language. Performance is similar to C# but coding in it is faster in my experience and above all a lot nicer if you like functional programming. Because it runs on the .NET VM or Mono VM it has good multicore support unlike OCaml. Haskell is more powerful as a language, but also…
Sounds interesting. How much is the community tied to Microsoft? "Runs on Mono" is ok, but if no one actually does, that's perhaps problematic for those who don't do MS.
Re: Programming languages worth checking out
#20Hmm, Nice to have all the up-and-coming languages lined-up in an internal comparison. I like Lua, Haskell and Io. I think that future languages will have to have a cleaner rather than an uglier look and syntax. For that reason, I have a visceral reaction to scala and factor. Even the one-line examples I've seen of these language have look like gibberish. I'm sure they are great in many ways but don't want them to suc…
Don't forget Eiffel and its progeny. Design By Contract and heavy use of assertions feels to me like it's closely related to Test First development. You also get fast runtime code out of it (as in C++ fast) in a very Pure-OO environment. (By many accounts, even more so than Java and C++.)