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Interesting Programming Languages

btbytes.com

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Re: Interesting Programming Languages

#71

Post by vinceguidry »

There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias. I'm a Rubyist, I like pure-OO, so what's interesting to me is language interop, so that I can get all the benefits of pure OO along with speed, and tooling so that you can get through the mass of context that is understanding the standard library and available libs so you don't have to build literally everything from scratch or spend 90% of your time in Google.

So I went looking for Pharo, which brings fascinating introspective tooling to Smalltalk, only to find that the author is biased towards 'any' high level features interoperating with C-like languages. And my list of interesting languages would look the same way, nobody would be able to see why I didn't put 'their' language on there.

Which is why I got excited for the awesome list thing. One person can't curate everything. You need a community of people invested in differentiating software offerings to the point where anybody can look at it and see what makes it interesting.

Re: Interesting Programming Languages

#72

Post by dragonwriter »

vinceguidry wrote: post #71

There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias. I'm a Rubyist, I like pure-OO, so what's interesting to me is language interop, so that I can get all the benefits of pure OO along with speed, and tooling so that you can get through the mass of context that is understanding the standard library and available libs so you don't have to build literally everything from scratch or spend 90% of…

> There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias

Well, “interesting” is subjective so it always is going to incorporate someone's opinion, but it doesn't have to be the author’s bias, e.g., if it was based, say, on surveying a wide and representative pool of developers.

Re: Interesting Programming Languages

#74

Post by vinceguidry »

dragonwriter wrote: post #72
vinceguidry wrote: post #71

There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias. I'm a Rubyist, I like pure-OO, so what's interesting to me is language interop, so that I can get all the benefits of pure OO along with speed, and tooling so that you can get through the mass of context that is understanding the standard library and available libs so you don't have to build literally everything from scratch or spend 90% of…

> There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias Well, “interesting” is subjective so it always is going to incorporate someone's opinion, but it doesn't have to be the author’s bias, e.g., if it was based, say, on surveying a wide and representative pool of developers.

I think about the concept of rationality a lot, and you touch upon a frequent topic of rumination. Does interestingness always have to be subjective? I don't think so, I think we can reduce it down to the contextual, and identify an ideal middle ground between the two. In that, we can make objective judgments that, given some context, a particular item sticks out and is therefore interesting. And that any interested curator could look at any new entrant and discover almost immediately what makes it interesting.

I think many machine language workloads boil down to searching for signal amongst noise. A human can then go look at the anomalies.

I wouldn't want a survey of a bunch of coders barely interested in curation. I want the guys who have been dealing with these things their entire careers and really care about the differences.

Not quite fully-automated discovery, but with a minimum of human fuss and a maximum of deliverable rational information.

Re: Interesting Programming Languages

#75

Post by ralphc »

btbytes wrote: post #37
6thaccount2 wrote: post #7

Notably missing: APL (Dyalog), J, Prolog, Rebol (Red is on the list), PicoLisp, Racket, Factor, 8th (Reva was mentioned and that was the creator's prior project), and Haskell. Maybe most of the above are too mainstream for the list.

I'm the author. You are right. I think the above are all "mainstream" enough for me. At the least, I've installed and played with them all at one time.

Is mainstream just measured by popularity? Ballerina has a pretty mainstream syntax, but I guess it's not well known enough.

Re: Interesting Programming Languages

#76

Post by 6thaccount2 »

neilv wrote: post #70
6thaccount2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol nope, not gatekeeping programming languages :) The above are all pretty cool though and each (as Larry Wall would put it) are the perfect examples of modernism. Each one takes a single idea to a fault. Lisp => lists, Haskell => functions, Scheme => lists and recursion, Prolog => logic, Smalltalk => objects, Forth => concatenative and extreme minimalism, and APL => arrays. Most post-modern languages combine many o…

That list of "modernism" languages has some bits of truth to it, but I think it's misleading to people who aren't already familiar with those languages, and "to a fault" sounds dismissive, and maybe discourages people from learning for themselves. Perl is an interesting language (and I defended Perl's merits in a language forum within the last year [1]). But people who've mostly done Perl for a long time might want t…

I do think "to a fault" is subjective, but things like Prolog make a great example. Prolog is really cool and useful, but it makes anything except for the queries a real nightmare and will therefore never takeoff as a general purpose language. That's all I'm trying to say. Languages like Perl allow you to do logic programming with logic programming libraries, but also make text processing a breeze.

Take it with a grain of salt of course. Smalltalk is amazing, but the way you store code in an image isn't for s everyone.

I don't understand your last paragraph...can you please elaborate? What cute sayings are you referring to?

Re: Interesting Programming Languages

#78

Post by neilv »

6thaccount2 wrote: post #76
neilv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list of "modernism" languages has some bits of truth to it, but I think it's misleading to people who aren't already familiar with those languages, and "to a fault" sounds dismissive, and maybe discourages people from learning for themselves. Perl is an interesting language (and I defended Perl's merits in a language forum within the last year [1]). But people who've mostly done Perl for a long time might want t…

I do think "to a fault" is subjective, but things like Prolog make a great example. Prolog is really cool and useful, but it makes anything except for the queries a real nightmare and will therefore never takeoff as a general purpose language. That's all I'm trying to say. Languages like Perl allow you to do logic programming with logic programming libraries, but also make text processing a breeze. Take it with a gra…

I meant the cute saying about modernism and "to a fault".

I agree about Prolog being logic-only. (Though it was once included as the query language of the complex data model of a commercial CAD-like system I worked on.)

Now Scheme (not lists and recursion to a fault) and other languages have logic programming as library or language extension: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniKanren

Incidentally, I don't want to sound dismissmive Prolog. It's worth learning a bit, such as with now-free books like: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-prolog

Re: Interesting Programming Languages

#79

Post by irq-1 »

Kit looks interesting. Anyone have any experience or comments?

> Kit is a “Compiles-to-C” language. It is strong, and statically typed with many modern language features like type inference, algebraic data types, pattern matching, generics, implicits, while still having low level features like raw pointers, and manual memory management. Kit is written in Haskell. notes.

https://www.kitlang.org/

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