The speed, size and dependability of programming languages

Post by avibryant » Sun, May 31, 2009, 9:37 PM UTC

gruseom wrote: post #17

silentbicycle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. It's surprising how deeply eliminating return changes the language semantics. I've postponed learning Javascript until recently, because my work hasn't usually been web-oriented, but it's interesting how similar Javascript and Lua are. They seem to have been aimed at the same target, but for historical reasons Javascript's development got frozen early, while Lua had time to iron out many similar design flaws.…

I think you hit the nail on the head earlier. It isn't "return" as such, it's expressions vs. statements. Backus got it right. What's surprising is that the superior way gets the tiny minority of usage. (Not so surprising if you know the historical reasons.) JS is not so bad. We're lucky that what we're doing (writing high-level FP code that compiles to JS and runs in pretty much every web browser in the world) is do…

Post by granular » Sun, May 31, 2009, 10:51 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #16

herdrick wrote: post #13

This is great. If you've looked at Peter Norvig's spell checker shootout you won't be surprised much. Ex., the story on Common Lisp and Scheme implementations is the same here: MzScheme is the mediocre best of an unimpressive lot. (I want to see Clojure and Arc on this.) Python looks great again. F# looks weak here but wins big in the spell checker with reasonable-looking code. Sounds interesting. What's the deal wit…

Well, arc's running on top of MzScheme, so it's likely to be a bit slower. Also, Stalin in the left column is a Scheme implementation, albeit one that is very restrictive for sake of raw speed. Also, it's worth noting that the features in a language that make large systems' codebases manageable (such as good module systems) are different from the features that allow you to pare down small scripts further. It's hard t…

Post by gruseom » Sun, May 31, 2009, 11:11 PM UTC

avibryant wrote: post #31

gruseom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head earlier. It isn't "return" as such, it's expressions vs. statements. Backus got it right. What's surprising is that the superior way gets the tiny minority of usage. (Not so surprising if you know the historical reasons.) JS is not so bad. We're lucky that what we're doing (writing high-level FP code that compiles to JS and runs in pretty much every web browser in the world) is do…

Can you get around (at least some of) those restrictions by wrapping things in function expressions? Here's a for loop: ((function(){ for(x in [1,2,3]){print(x)} })(), 42)

Post by kinghajj » Mon, Jun 01, 2009, 12:33 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #32

tlrobinson wrote: post #30

The benchmarks used for the article was from 2005. Make sure to check out the 2009 versions: http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/uploaded_images/size-vs-speed-vs-... V8 has propelled JavaScript into the coveted bottom-left corner, which is awesome. SquirrelFish Extreme should be right up there with it, if it were included.

More reason to believe JavaScript is going to be huge on the server-side. As concise and (nearly as) powerful as Python, Perl, and Ruby, but getting faster at a much more rapid clip...and already required for the front-end, so everybody on the team is already familiar with it. Library coverage will take another couple of years to reach a reasonable level, but I'd bet on it happening.

Post by tlrobinson » Mon, Jun 01, 2009, 12:39 AM UTC

kinghajj wrote: post #37

SwellJoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More reason to believe JavaScript is going to be huge on the server-side. As concise and (nearly as) powerful as Python, Perl, and Ruby, but getting faster at a much more rapid clip...and already required for the front-end, so everybody on the team is already familiar with it. Library coverage will take another couple of years to reach a reasonable level, but I'd bet on it happening.

I agree. Once I learned how truly powerful Javascript really is, once you get past the horrible DOM, I knew it could one day become a general-purpose scripting language and not just a web one. As soon as someone makes a good command-line Javascript interpreter, web apps will come as soon as someone creates a CGI extension to that interpreter.