151–160 of 184 posts
- treat a program as a database
- allow programs to be visualised in many formats (visually as graphs, textually as code etc)
- allow programs to be manipulated through many interfaces (visually, textually, programatically)
It’s not that text and syntax should die, it’s that different visualization and manipulation paradigms are appropriate for different levels of abstractions within programs.
2c
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CTEs can go a long way toward that, as can stored procs
LATERAL joins can help with reusing calculations https://www.periscopedata.com/blog/reuse-calculations-in-the...
> The INCITS 226–1994 standard consists of 1153 pages. This was only beaten by C++ ISO/IEC 14882:2011 standard with 1338 pages some 17 years after. C++ has to drag a bag of heritage though, it was not always that big. Common Lisp was created huge from the scratch. This is a surprisingly incorrect remark, given that the author is apparently fairly well aware of programming language history. Common Lisp is a relatively…
The 1338 pages of the C++11 standard is more than 2/3rds about the standard library. Only around the first 400 are about the core language.
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Indeed. The original description of Lisp included something like 10 primitives. That's it. Numerous examples of full-blown Lisps have been built from just those few primitives. One article I read even showed how arithmetic can be built from car and cdr.
Source? I’d love to read more about this
I would qualify Pony as only fast, concurrency-safe, new language noteworthy, also it's capabilities system and complete lack of blocking IO, needed to provide concurrency safety. Also its GC, which is completely new.
Go isn't just C done right, but both C and C++ done right. Similarly, Kotlin is both Java and Apache Groovy done right.
There are some good points in this article, namely that a very lengthy language specification is a sure sign that the language is overblown and probably the victim of design by committee. Modula-2 had a 100 page description, and i would take it over C++ any day. Heck C++ still doesn't have separate compilation. It is a total pile of crap IMHO. Another good point is that languages that facilitate domain specific langu…
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Very much agree. Programming notation, like math, is supposed to be easy to convey exact meaning, unlike human language. Every attempt there has been to make code look like English hasn't worked out well. SQL, for example, is incredibly verbose, with complex syntax. This obscures what is otherwise very good semantics. I think this is why a lot of people hate writing queries.
I rather think Math is a good counter example. Or physics rather. There aren’t enough greek letters in the alphabet to satisfy the average academic paper. You first have to load in your memory the meaning of 20 different symbols then decypher a formula before you can process it. Now people who read lots of papers are probably used to this exercise but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing (you can get used to running o…
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Very much agree. Programming notation, like math, is supposed to be easy to convey exact meaning, unlike human language. Every attempt there has been to make code look like English hasn't worked out well. SQL, for example, is incredibly verbose, with complex syntax. This obscures what is otherwise very good semantics. I think this is why a lot of people hate writing queries.
I rather think Math is a good counter example. Or physics rather. There aren’t enough greek letters in the alphabet to satisfy the average academic paper. You first have to load in your memory the meaning of 20 different symbols then decypher a formula before you can process it. Now people who read lots of papers are probably used to this exercise but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing (you can get used to running o…
For example, how would you write something like a tensor H_i^{kl} (pretend those are rendered sub and superscripts)?
Looking at that symbol, I immediately understand that H is a tensor with one lower index and two upper. Now, it precise words, it would probably be something like:
"Let H be a tensor with lower index i and upper indices kl."
Oh wait, we've already had to define all the variables anyway (since we don't want to specialize it to an individual tensor, because that would be useless). Why not just use a bit more notation and write it as H_i^{kl}?
If we ran out of letters, we'd have to use Greek ones. Now we are back to where we started.
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Very much agree. Programming notation, like math, is supposed to be easy to convey exact meaning, unlike human language. Every attempt there has been to make code look like English hasn't worked out well. SQL, for example, is incredibly verbose, with complex syntax. This obscures what is otherwise very good semantics. I think this is why a lot of people hate writing queries.
> SQL, for example, is incredibly verbose, with complex syntax. This obscures what is otherwise very good semantics. I disagree; I think SQL syntax is one of the things that make it very clear and easy to use; it's got a couple of warts, especially related to automated tooling (the biggest being fixed order of clauses with SELECT before FROM), but it's exceptionally well fit for it's purpose. > I think this is why a…
Non-programmers often find SQL queries easier, and simple SQL queries are intuitive. Programmers, who are likely to do more complicated ones, usually don't like it. At least in my experience.
The issue is that it is hard to quickly visually parse complicated queries, like big CTEs. Having it in a less English-like notation would go a long way to fix this.