41–50 of 70 posts
What about Prolog? Why it's not in the list?
...Erlang is bad enough :P
Is anyone using D? Is it a lot better than C++ or just a little?
And GCC-based implementation is lagging behind in features, and also scores consistently 10-30% slower than C/C++ in benchmarks, which kills D's appeal as a performant replacement for C.
What Walter needs to do, IMO, is to abandon his own implementation completely and closely work with GCC/Linux community to include high-quality D into standard GCC package. Then we may start seeing decent software written in it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When you're doing prototyping, you want to delay that decision as long as you can, so you are making the most informed decision possible. And nothing informs your decisions like the act of developing and getting feedback from users.
Optional static typing gives you the best of both worlds. But I don't know how you'd get the equivalent with Design By Contract/Unit Testing. Both of those feel a little unnatural to me. I'd rather just tinker, and not have to set up extra stuff before or after I code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Good cross-platform support is indeed very important for a programming language. The F# community is still small so there probably aren't many users on Linux and OS X. Don Syme (the creator of F#) has said that Microsoft will release the F# compiler under an open source license. I think that the future of the language will depend on it. If the F# compiler cannot be included in Linux distributions then the uptake from…
$ sudo port install fsharp
I guess I should have paid that guy on elance his $1,000 to code it up in C for me.
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...
What about Prolog? Why it's not in the list?
Is it still being used at all? I would be interested in it, too (and I don't think Erlang is very similar to it at all???).
I'm pretty sure Prolog is still being used, but it doesn't have the buzz of, say, Fortran or COBOL or Pascal.
"Unlike other Lisps (and Schemes) you may have encountered before, Clojure comes with some interesting additions: [...] Many pre-built data structures, like Vectors, Maps, Sets, Collections, …" Here I stopped reading.
Why? It's a nice adition to the language and makes using it a much better experience. My first big project in LISP was making a Sudoku solver for a school project. Could only use basic instructions and lambdas. It was not pleasant trip :P
experimenting with lua this evening. be curious to hear if others have had good/bad experiences with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure about vim. I use TextMate (there is an Io bundle).