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Yay! A new scripting language!Yay! A new scripting language!Posted Dec 21, 2010 20:45 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)Parent article: Videos from the 2010 LLVM Developers' Meeting
I'm sure that a new scripting language is what we were all waiting for.
When will people understand that we need _fewer_ programming languages, not more of them?
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Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 21, 2010 21:24 UTC (Tue) by madcoder (subscriber, #30027) [Link]
says a guy named HelloWorld ! (not that I disagree, but well, I couldn't resist but notice the irony)
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 22, 2010 1:16 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I say, keep inventing scripting languages until someone invents one that pleases everyone!
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 22, 2010 18:50 UTC (Wed) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
"When will people understand that we need _fewer_ programming languages, not more of them?"
We need more good ones. For example, though I use it heavily and it works better than the alternatives for many applications, I would not describe C++ as a "good" programming language. Survivable is more like it. Same with Java. In order to get a few good languages we need to try a lot of survivable, fringe and awful ones.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 23, 2010 0:07 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> We need more good ones.
No, there are quite a few good languages around. I consider Haskell to be a well-thought-out and elegant language, and there are others like Smalltalk or OCaml. The problem clearly isn't the lack of languages, but the lack of tools, libraries and general momentum around these languages. And of course, the more languages you have, the fewer people will work on the ecosystem of each language.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 23, 2010 4:39 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Because all three of those languages -- and most others -- don't actually work for everyone.
Try writing Bioshock 3 in OCaml. Or a video decoder in SmallTalk. Or mobile web browser in Haskell. Or a flexible good-looking GUI toolkit in LISP. Or a video card driver in Ruby.
Trying to do any of those things makes just as little sense as trying to write GMail in C, or a high-performance cluster database server in assembly language, or a log report analyzer in C++.
You need different tools for different types of jobs.
And we come up with new types of jobs all the damn time.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 23, 2010 10:51 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] I explicitly said that there's nothing wrong with having different languages for different purposes. However, I don't see a point in having dozens of dynamically typed and basically equivalent scripting languages with superficial syntactic differences. For example, there's utterly no point in JavaScript, as Netscape could just have embedded a Scheme or Lua interpreter. And it's the same with many many other languages.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 23, 2010 21:32 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Except that Scheme is disgustingly ugly to some of us and doesn't work the same as Lua or JavaScript, and JavaScript doesn't work identically to Lua and those differences are actually very important to some of us. Not to mention that Lua today is nothing at all like Lua back when JavaScript come into being, and JavaScript had a ton of features that Lua did not (such as closures).
Your narrow minded idea of what is a "good enough" language does not actually reflect the opinions and experiences of all of the millions of developers on the planet. Sorry, but the academic purist ideology doesn't reflect what happens in the real world because the real world actually understands that there are millions of developers with millions of different needs and opinions and your idea of what is good is not in any way a fact or absolute truth.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 28, 2010 0:44 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> Except that Scheme is disgustingly ugly to some of us
Well, so is JavaScript. > and doesn't work the same as Lua or JavaScript Please, tell me a significant feature in JavaScript that Scheme lacks. You keep insulting me by calling me narrow-minded and an ideologist, but you don't tell me what's actually wrong with my arguments. You keep saying I ignore the needs the needs of developers, but you can't tell me what these needs are and why you think Lua or Scheme don't fulfill them. Discussing like this is pointless.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 26, 2010 23:49 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> No, there are quite a few good languages around. I consider Haskell to be
> a well-thought-out and elegant language, and there are others like > Smalltalk or OCaml. The problem clearly isn't the lack of languages, but > the lack of tools, libraries and general momentum around these languages. > And of course, the more languages you have, the fewer people will work on > the ecosystem of each language.
There's no such thing as a good language-- there are only languages that are good for a certain purpose.
Even if you (or a committee of people) managed to identify a set of "perfect" programming languages for 2010, in a few years, they wouldn't be perfect any more. The problems that are most important change over time. In the early nineties, concurrency often seemed like a minor issue, since almost everyone was using single-processor computers. In contrast, good runtime performance was extremely important back then. Nowadays, it doesn't matter as much for many applications. Those are just two examples-- there are literally hundreds of trends in computer architecture and design that are changing things over time.
Theorists often feel like there hasn't been very much progress in programming languages since Lisp, since Lisp originated so many of the concepts used by later languages. But from a practical perspective, there has been. You can build a website using Ruby faster than you could with C++. You can write business applications better in Java than you could in COBOL. And so on.
If you don't feel that Crack (or any other new language) meets your needs, then don't use it. If you think Scheme is the bee's knees, then advocate that. (Maybe start by trying to convince MIT to teach it to undergraduates again; they recently started teaching Python instead.) Remember that we do this stuff for fun, not because we want to take over the world. Linus' initial announcement of Linux said that he was "doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." Don't worry about taking over the world, just worry about doing a good job and having fun.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 27, 2010 1:59 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> There's no such thing as a good language-- there are only languages that are good for a certain purpose.
By that logic, nothing is ever good, as nothing is good for all purposes. Besides, I've said multiple times that there's nothing wrong with having multiple languages for different purposes. Why do you want me to repeat myself?
> Even if you (or a committee of people) managed to identify a set of "perfect" programming languages for 2010, in a few years, they wouldn't be perfect any more. The problems that are most important change over time. In the early nineties, concurrency often seemed like a minor issue, since almost everyone was using single-processor computers. In contrast, good runtime performance was extremely important back then. Nowadays, it doesn't matter as much for many applications. Those are just two examples-- there are literally hundreds of trends in computer architecture and design that are changing things over time.
> Theorists often feel like there hasn't been very much progress in programming languages since Lisp, since Lisp originated so many of the concepts used by later languages. But from a practical perspective, there has been. You can build a website using Ruby faster than you could with C++. You can write business applications better in Java than you could in COBOL. And so on.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Dec 31, 2010 19:49 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> So, what specific issue does the crack language address? If it has
> innovative constructs for concurrent applications, great! If it's really > great for building a certain type of application, wonderful! But when I > saw the slides, I didn't see anything remotely innovative.
The specific issue Crack was meant to address was to create a "scripting" language that could easily be compiled to native bytecode. I don't have an immediate use for it, but maybe someone else will find it interesting.
> Cobol was already outdated when Java appeared. Therefore the question is
Smalltalk evolved into Ruby by assimilating the good ideas from Perl. It was a big improvement.
OCaml is actually a dialect of Standard ML, a language that was developed during the 1980s. The relationship between Standard ML and OCaml is kind of similar to the relationship between K&R C and ANSI C. Standard ML is older than Java, not newer.
I wrote a compiler in Standard ML for a class. There were certain things that could be expressed very elegantly. Anything that was an operation on a tree usually came out looking very nice. A lot of other algorithms didn't translate so well.
Standard ML has implicit typing, which means that you don't have to specify the type of parameters to, and return values from, functions. This is all very neat and elegant. However, in practice, it means that you can make a change at point A in your program, another change at point B, and get a type error at point C, which you then have to figure out. Also, when you look at code from other people, you have to try to figure out their intentions without having explicit type annotations.
The syntax of the language is very minimalistic. Unlike in Lisp, you are encouraged to omit parentheses in a lot of places. Over time, I learned that this was a bad idea, because it made the compiler's very difficult job even harder. The compiler errors I got in Standard ML were consistently incomprehensible-- yes, worse than C++ template errors. Part of this is no doubt due to lack of funding, but they have had 25+ years to get it right. I suspect that the complexity of the type system makes good error messages very hard to achieve. Adding explicit type annotations and parentheses can help a little bit.
I favor languages that have the flexibility to be used in a functional style, but that don't force this on you all the time. Your preferences may be different. But claiming that obscure academic languages are "state of the art" and blasting people for not using them probably won't help your cause.
Yay! A new scripting language! Posted Jan 5, 2011 11:39 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Maybe start by trying to convince MIT to teach it to undergraduates again; they recently started teaching Python instead.
I'd not heard that. Such a tragedy.
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