Still waiting for swap prefetch [LWN.net]

Still waiting for swap prefetch

Posted Jul 26, 2007 12:23 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: Still waiting for swap prefetch by rsidd
Parent article: Still waiting for swap prefetch

Oh dear no there's _plenty_ wrong with Python. It's dynamic
typing nature means that simple objects have huge amounts of
baggage that they have to carry around, mostly never used.

C sucks for programming too, for the reasons you outline.

But guess what folks! C and Python are not the only programming
languages in the world!! You won't believe it, but other
programming languages have been invented.

My personal fave at the moment is OCaml. About as fast as C,
statically typed, no buffer overflows, small memory footprint,
access to Perl & Python libraries, and loads of native libs.

Rich.

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Still waiting for swap prefetch

Posted Jul 27, 2007 11:56 UTC (Fri) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link]

> C and Python are not the only programming
> languages in the world!! You won't believe it, but other
> programming languages have been invented.

> My personal fave at the moment is OCaml. About as fast as C,
> statically typed, no buffer overflows, small memory footprint,
> access to Perl & Python libraries, and loads of native libs.

Two suggestions. Suggestion 1: start lobbying people all around to start using OCaml: universities, companies, etc. If you are successful you have a bunch of people who *know* what it is (currently the people with that characteristics are so few that it doesn't matter). Or choose suggestion 2: start implementing some *real cool* thing in OCaml, making sure that developing the equivalent thing (e.g., with same performance, flexibility, etc) is so expensive that nobody can do *because of a choice of different language*. Then you serve as an example showing others the real benefit of the language.

Before you do so, accept that languages behaving the same way as in C or Python are those who know by those who work on creating applications. Problem is, money talks. If the industry do need C and Python, that's what's university courses teach, that's what's people know, and that's what applications will be written in.

Still waiting for swap prefetch

Posted Aug 2, 2007 7:40 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]

My problem with Ocaml is its syntax and its functional mindset: I tried once to learn Ocaml and I disliked the syntax plus the PDF book I used insisted on using functional way to solve everything which is strange as Ocaml is said to support both imperative and functional style, why the book insisted so much on the functional style is beyond me, bleach.

So to be successful, Ocaml would need 2 things:
1) replace the current default syntax with a better one.
There is already an alternative syntax for Ocaml (so apparently I'm not the only one who don't like the default syntax), it's quite better and F# (an Ocaml clone for .Net) 's syntax looks even better.
2) improve tutorials book to teach both imperative style and functional style, without having such blatant bias towards functional style, it has its place but not for everything.

Somehow I doubt that will happen, so Ocaml is bound to stay in the limelight..