331–340 of 380 posts
Even though this could more properly be called, "Why having language support for M:N thread multiplexing is important", I thought it was a refreshing article on why I might actually use a bit of perl6. Last year I attended a conference and saw Larry Wall speak. It was an overview of Perl 6 and I was completely underwhelmed. Larry spent about half the time talking about unicode support. It wasn't a boring talk, but I…
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I hadn't heard of Tcl before but it looks awesome! What do you find its ideal use cases to be?
Tcl is pretty old. A lot of the territory it covered well is now better covered by other things. One of its great strengths was being extensible. It's pretty easy to bake some functionality into Tcl and provide a new shell with it. This is what expect ( http://expect.sourceforge.net/ ) is, for instance. Another early advantage of Tcl was Tk, which provided Tcl extended with GUI stuff. Tk was cross-platform and establ…
Yes it is, and that's a good thing. Over the years Tcl has become increasingly Scheme-like in some respects. In fact without too much trouble I've ported some programs I'd written in Scheme to Tcl because of Tcl's portability and easy access to GUI when needed. OTOH adapting some code from Javascript to Tcl was harder.
Tcl is very useful for utilities. Library support is enormous so there aren't a whole lot of things that are impossible in that domain. For ~20 years I used a a client-server scheduling program that I wrote entirely in Tcl/Tk. It required only minimal maintenance, in fact hadn't touched in over the last 10 years it was deployed.
The main difficulty has been marginal debugging support, but there are ways around it so it's not insurmountable.
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So yeah, I definitely get that. I'm no Haskell master, but I found that my code progressed this way (assuming I was trying to do what you mentioned": main :: IO () main = do putStrLn "Please input your age:" age = 40) (putStrLn "..." ++ (show age)) But as you get more comfortable, you get something like: type Age = Int -- Imagine there are constants here for youngAgeMessage, middleAgeMessage, and oldAgeMessage, -- fo…
This is a great comment outlining some of Haskell's strengths. Definitely, ADTs should exist in every language claiming their static type system as a feature. Just one thing that stands out to me: > "Anything can be anything or sometimes nil" is a hard pill to swallow once you've used Haskell. In a language like Java yes, nearly every type is inhabited by null. In fairness, a similar problem exists in Haskell: every…
I've heard that Idris is basically Haskell but strict by default -- I've never tried it but maybe I should? I'm hesitant to go to a language with even less libraries/support/mindshare than Haskell though
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I can't remember the last time I saw a reasonable comment more than a half hour or so old greyed out. But I often see highly-voted comment with an old greyed-out reply saying "why is this being downvoted". All that's happening is that the sample size of votes is too small early on to be meaningful.
But I still often wonder about the motivation for those early downvoters. And I'll still hold that this is acceptable curiosity.
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The Haskell introductory landscape has definitely changed. Learn You A Haskell for great good ( http://learnyouahaskell.com ) is an excellent introductory book to read to get started with Haskell. A drier but more in-depth read is http://book.realworldhaskell.org/ Also, when you hit monads again, the best advice I can give you to understanding them (99% of Haskell guides out there seem to be about monads) is to take…
I am always curious why monad is important in functional language, isn't it accurate to say that monad is just a wrapper class?
The monadic pattern is just extremely common (and desirable), here's what the wiki (https://wiki.haskell.org/Monad) says:
> Monads in Haskell can be thought of as composable computation descriptions. The essence of monad is thus separation of composition timeline from the composed computation's execution timeline, as well as the ability of computation to implicitly carry extra data, as pertaining to the computation itself, in addition to its one (hence the name) output, that it will produce when run (or queried, or called upon). This lends monads to supplementing pure calculations with features like I/O, common environment or state, etc.
If I were to try and paraphrase that, it's because it is such a good abstraction for all the things you have to do that aren't as simple as pure functions. In other languages, just about any function can do anything, so they're understandably less important
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Ehh... I don't really understand the impulse to "call out" downvotes, or ask people to explain why they're downvoting something that you wrote or agree with. Sometimes there is some really weird voting dynamic here and it would be interesting to know what goes on. For a lack of a better word you can call it intellectual curiosity or something.
I can't remember the last time I saw a reasonable comment more than a half hour or so old greyed out. But I often see highly-voted comment with an old greyed-out reply saying "why is this being downvoted". All that's happening is that the sample size of votes is too small early on to be meaningful.
Many times it's because the user was just asking a question, or made what they thought was a perfectly reasonable comment.
HN is pretty horrible with voting etiquette.
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I have seen examples where the naive Perl 6 implementation is faster than the equivalent C code. (The one I'm thinking of is probably owing to Spesh and the JIT, but I forget what it was about) Here's an example where a naive Perl 6 version is going to beat the pants off of the naive version in another language: Find the sum of all integers from 10 to 1000000 inclusive. In Perl 6: say [+] 10 .. 1000000 the [+] is a l…
That's pretty cool! I started trying to learn perl6 and write my first interesting program. I have a copy of 'ray tracing in a weekend' and am trying to translate the basic ray tracer from c++ to perl6. It's remarkably slow right now.. It takes 1.5 minutes to generate an image. I tried to do the same thing in Julia and it takes 1.5 seconds. So I guess I must be doing something wrong!
Perl 6 carries 2 pieces of baggage from its predecessor - prefixing variables with "my" to create lexical scope and the obligatory "use v6;" at the top of every script. Why can't an advanced language like Perl 6 scope variables without littering "my" everywhere? You don't see it in any other mainstream language I can think of.
Some people (such as me), prefer designating variable scope and easily identifying where a variable was defined. By the way, that isn't required by Perl 5. It was decided by the community that it was beneficial in that it solved far more problems debugging than the small bit of extra effort required, so the common refrain to "use strict;" was adopted because with that pragma it then is required.
> Why can't an advanced language like Perl 6 scope variables without littering "my" everywhere?
It could, but the community has decided it's not really beneficial. Have you actually examined why you think it's better?
> obligatory "use v6;" at the top of every script
That's not obligatory. You can omit at your leisure. If you do in include it and your script is accidentally called from a Perl 5 interpreter, you will either get an error, or if supported it will try to load a Perl 6 interpreter to parse the code.