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Programming languages worth checking out

h3rald.com

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Re: Programming languages worth checking out

#31

Post by richcollins »

Jasber wrote: post #4

I'm curious if anyone has any experience with Io ( http://iolanguage.com/ ). The description sounds like an appealing combination: Its unusual, minimalist and yet elegant and powerful syntax reminds of Smalltalk, but the language goes far beyond that. Io is an object-oriented, prototype-based, message-based and fully-reflective programming language. This means that you use messages like in Smalltalk, you create objec…

I co-wrote (with Steve) SoundConverter for Windows:

http://dekorte.com/projects/shareware/SoundConverter/

The interface talks to an Io "server" which handles business logic.

We're currently working on a shopping aggregation startup. The crawler is written in Io.

Pixar's RenderMan image tool uses Io as its scripting language:

https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/it.html

Io is still under development so you might run into the occasional bug. Bugs are encountered more often in the addons than in the core interpreter (which is stable).

Re: Programming languages worth checking out

#32

Post by russell »

h3rald wrote: post #16
gruseom wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

Do it in Haskell. The you can explain it to me. :-)

Re: Programming languages worth checking out

#33

Post by thomasmallen »

richcollins wrote: post #31
Jasber wrote: post #4

I'm curious if anyone has any experience with Io ( http://iolanguage.com/ ). The description sounds like an appealing combination: Its unusual, minimalist and yet elegant and powerful syntax reminds of Smalltalk, but the language goes far beyond that. Io is an object-oriented, prototype-based, message-based and fully-reflective programming language. This means that you use messages like in Smalltalk, you create objec…

I co-wrote (with Steve) SoundConverter for Windows: http://dekorte.com/projects/shareware/SoundConverter/ The interface talks to an Io "server" which handles business logic. We're currently working on a shopping aggregation startup. The crawler is written in Io. Pixar's RenderMan image tool uses Io as its scripting language: https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/it.html Io is still under development so you might…

Ah, I see you're the creator of Io. Do you know of any Io tools for Vim? Syntax and indent would be great if nothing else...Google didn't turn up anything.

Re: Programming languages worth checking out

#35

Post by jd »

trevelyan wrote: post #11

experimenting with lua this evening. be curious to hear if others have had good/bad experiences with it.

It's great as an embedded language. The implementation is so tiny you can effortlessly change the language to change whatever it is you don't like about it.

The C++ bindings aren't so great, last time I checked. The documentation is not of a consistently high quality, but it doesn't matter much because, once again, the language isn't very complex.

I prefer lua to any other embeddable language, including Python.

Re: Programming languages worth checking out

#36

Post by iamelgringo »

gaius wrote: post #22
felixmar wrote: post #15

11. 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…

If Microsoft can work out a sane licensing arrangement for compute farms/clusters/clouds (whatever we're calling them this week) of Win 2008 Server, then F# is a game-changer of a similar scale to Google's MapReduce. That's a big if tho'. Having said that, Windows is cheaper than RHEL already...

Have you looked at Microsoft's BizSpark program? Free enrollment for startups and all the licenses you can eat for 3 years.

Re: Programming languages worth checking out

#38

Post by jballanc »

stcredzero wrote: post #20
joe_the_user wrote: post #12

Hmm, 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++.)

I played with Eiffel for a time, but found that Design By Contract was a bit overly restrictive for amateur programming. Now that I'm doing more professional stuff, I think it's worth looking at again. There's also a lot of Eiffel influence in Ruby, so moving over from Ruby is not so hard.

Re: Programming languages worth checking out

#40

Post by signa11 »

russell wrote: post #34

Is anyone using D? Is it a lot better than C++ or just a little?

well, i played around with it for sometime. it is pretty good e.g i really like the new (and much improved!) template mechanism especially meta-programming abilities, variadic template arguments, contracts for enforcing class/function invariants, function-literals, dynamic closures etc.

the issue that i have (imho ofcourse) is that of 2 incompatible standard libraries phobos and tango, which makes it quite painful to work at anything significant/non-trivial. iirc, there was an effort to have an stl kind of thing for D, not sure how far (or in what state) it is.

also, it seems to me (i can be wrong about it) that D is being marketed towards corpo-drones doing win32 (c++) stuff, rather than to linux C devs. most likely, they (corpo-drones) are moving towads C#/.net and i doubt that they are interested...

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