Comments on: you.would? like(:fries).with(that)

By: Samuel

Samuel — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:34:54 +0000

@prim: Yes, I have looked at Erlang. It’s decent, but it only shifts the complexity around when it comes to concurrent programming. It’s certainly a better approach than threads, but message-passing is still just as primitive a way of dealing with concurrency. Granted, I’m not sure I can think of a better way.

By: prim

prim — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:49:51 +0000

“This really isn’t news. Software is hard. Concurrent software is harder. We know that. The solutions offered today are primitive, and not much different from the thinking over thirty years ago. Whether you use some shared-memory model or some message-passing model, writing concurrent programs is a mentally exhausting process with a lot of work centered around getting the parallelism right.”

Have you checked Erlang? It makes concurrent programming much simpler.

By: Samuel

Samuel — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:14:47 +0000

@Trevor: Every language has some tradeoffs. My biggest two are fault-tolerance primitives a la Erlang, and Hindley-Milner type inferencing a la ML/Haskell. I honestly am most interested in seeing new languages that incorporate these features, as I think that the existing ones have their own issues weighing them down.

@magice: What @sean said. Beyond that, though, just because we have a mountain of stuff built out of shit is no excuse to stop building stuff out of shit. Work smarter.

@sean: Indeed, I like Erlang. Although, I find it a bit cumbersome to develop in.

By: sean

sean — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:27:02 +0000

Since the post mentions parallelism, I’m willing to bet that the author likes Erlang.

@magice:
We do have a modern English. We call it English. Our natural languages aren’t stagnated like our computer languages are. Every time someone coins a technical neologism or verbs their nouns, they’re performing language design.

Your idea about hundreds of thousands of programmers porting COBOL code to OCaml is silly. Let the working old code sit and do its job. People could be writing their NEW code in a modern language instead of C++, Java, and their ilk; that’s the point here.

By: magice

magice — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:04:20 +0000

Well, to tell you the truth, Fortran/LISP can express anything English can. Now, can you please express to me something that English can’t? Seriously, English has been around for centuries? What have those old folks done to the language? Why don’t we have a more modern English, that express ourselves easier? Oh, yeah, lolcat-English.

The reason we don’t use more “modern” languages is the opposite of what you said. We have way too much stuffs built already, and switching to, says, Haskell would mean such an effort that no one can muster. Oh, talking about which, I am willing to bet that your favorite “modern programming language” is not as expressive as Lisp is (including the case you like Lisp).

Lastly, I don’t understand this: if you want to switch to modern framework (says, COBOL to OCaml), you need A LOT OF WORK, so you need a HUGE work force. You need tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of capable programmers working like dogs to covert all of those finished, tested, tried (over and over) from an “ancient” language to something newer. Why do you complain when we train more programmers? Or, are you afraid of competition?

By: Trevor Burnham

Trevor Burnham — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:01:59 +0000

So: You rue the lack of mainstream adoption of more modern languages that break from the FORTRAN/Lisp mold. Which languages in particular would you like to do see more widely used?