languages vs libraries [LWN.net]

languages vs libraries

Posted Jun 24, 2004 9:05 UTC (Thu) by davidw (subscriber, #947)
Parent article: The New Age of Programming

A flexible programming language will adapt to new situations and needs via libraries. If the core language is small and flexible (think C) then it's easy to keep reusing it for new things that the original designers never considered.

That's one of the things I really like about Tcl - a very simple core, with an extremely flexible syntax (control structures, for instance, are regular commmands). In other words, you can add new constructs to the language... like lisp, to some degree. Python has a nice small core, but OTOH keeps getting bits of syntax welded on to it (list comprehensions, for instance).

The ability to repurpose is something I don't like about PHP. It's very firmly wedded to one particular niche, where it happens to work well, but there is nothing about the language itself that is very exciting, or was any better than other languages that could have been used for the same tool.

In closing, Java(TM) is not an internet language, nor a standards language. It is a proprietary Sun Microsystems product.

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languages vs libraries

Posted Jun 24, 2004 14:44 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

That's one of the things I really like about Tcl - a very simple core, with an extremely flexible syntax (control structures, for instance, are regular commmands)

This may be so but when I see "simple core, flexible syntax" but no compatibility between versions (in any direction), no support for number of packages on new versions and no support for number of packages on old versions "disaster" is the only thing that comes to my mind. Try to find Debian's discussion on TCL and you'll see that it's even worse then Perl in this regard...

languages vs libraries

Posted Jun 24, 2004 16:21 UTC (Thu) by davidw (subscriber, #947) [Link]

This is FUD. You may not like Tcl, but please stick to the facts. Tcl is quite backwards compatible, supports binary packages through several versions without recompiling, and has zillions of packages for it.

Tcl's big problem is that it is no longer cool, and so people like to rag on it. Not that it doesn't have defects, but they aren't the ones you listed, - you appear to just be repeating something you read second hand.

languages vs libraries

Posted Jun 24, 2004 14:49 UTC (Thu) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]

A flexible programming language will adapt to new situations and needs via libraries.

Amen, brother. I do most of my heavy-lifting programming in C++, since that's what I used primarily as a grad student cutting my teeth on sizeable chunks of code. Consequently, I've built up a set of libraries to handle such things as networking, setting up distributed systems, automatic ASN.1 serialization, and event-based concurrency. Could these have been included in the language? Sure. I could use Java and remove the networking and serialization libraries at least. The fact is, however, that I don't have to. The packages only have to be written once, and let's not kid ourselves that Java's networking interface is a logical consequence of the language design—it's a package that just happens to be included in the distribution and defined as part of the "standard".