Advanced programming languages

http://matt.might.net/articles/best-programming-languages/

by fogus • 15 years ago

100 40 15 years ago

matt.might.net

wewyor• 15 years ago

Previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992218

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374635

edw2• 15 years ago

Just the mention of Scheme, my favorite programming language, makes me get irritated when I think about the thousand or fifteen hundred lines of JavaScript I've written in the last couple weeks. I'm basically writing Scheme using C syntax, and the anonymous functions as arguments to functions which are called by anonymous functions that are themselves arguments to functions really start to get confusing, in large part because the mixing of parentheses and curly brackets and the semicolons and all the things that are supposed to be the sane alternative to all those sets of parantheses. Oh, and let's not even mention the way JavaScript doesn't do block scoping the way C++ does, and let's not even think about how closures interact with mutation—which almost guarantees that code with for loops and closures will have bugs in it.

And the sad thing is, I don't mind writing JavaScript. Relatively speaking, I love JavaScript. Now, if a framework-platform like Node.js existed for Clojure, now, that would be a different story. Except that I'd then constantly have to do mental context switches whenever I jumped from client to server code.

There is no rest for the wicked, I suppose.

tkahn62• 15 years ago

Have you heard of CoffeeScript? It makes writing JS a much, much more pleasant experience.

edw2• 15 years ago

Thanks; I just checked it out and while it has some nice features, it doesn't do all that much to compact my already-dense JS. Additionally, the added complexity it introduces to the development process negates some of its charm, as does the extra cognitive load of playing human backtracking parser whenever I have to think about what function applications require parens and which don't. (This is all IMO, so while I think I've accurately portrayed CoffeeScript, YMMV, so people should check it for themselves.)

ataggart• 15 years ago

>Now, if a framework-platform like Node.js existed for Clojure, now, that would be a different story.

What about aleph?

http://github.com/ztellman/aleph

pmjordan• 15 years ago

There's also Saturnine, https://github.com/texodus/saturnine though I haven't tried it yet.

sjs• 15 years ago

Sibilant is Lisp lipstick for JavaScript.

https://github.com/jbr/sibilant

muyuu• 15 years ago

The guys at INRIA (you may know them from Bigloo or OCaml) have a scheme to javascript compiler that works quite well. HOP is made with that.

This short paper: http://www-sop.inria.fr/indes/scheme2js/files/icfp2006.pdf elaborates on Scheme to JS compilation and goes beyond. You can actually generate all the HTML in Scheme as well (as done in HOP).

If you download HOP's sources, it's there.

ahrjay• 15 years ago

Block scoping is part of ES5 using let

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Statem...

russellallen2• 15 years ago

If he thinks that Smalltalk is a "alternate yet fully capable universe that branched off from mainstream computing long ago" then I'm not sure I want to know what he thinks about selflanguage.org ...

But seriously, his four 'advanced programming languages' seem to be all in the functional space. That's great, but I'd recommend looking outside that as well. Maybe Haskell, Pharo, Factor and Erlang?

mahmud• 15 years ago

SECONDED!

Add Mozart/Oz to the mix for good measure.

jefffoster• 15 years ago

+1 for Mozart/Oz. It's a great language for exploring the various paradigms of programming. Working through "Concepts, Techniques and and Models of Computer Programming" (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html) with Mozart/Oz gives a great tour of programming techniques and manages to stay in one language for the whole journey.

plastics2• 15 years ago

Or AliceML, its Hindley–Milner typed cousin.

swannodette• 15 years ago

He does mentions Haskell. Pharo is Smalltalk. Erlang is functional.

gloob• 15 years ago

Though, in fairness, Erlang has a completely different emphasis than most other functional languages - instead of provability, experimenting with type systems, or state-phobia, my understanding is that it was pretty much engineered for making stable systems, and everything else is a secondary concern. (It was also put together by a telecom, rather than academics or hobbyists).

russellallen2• 15 years ago

I was giving my four suggestions to show how the author could have chosen more variety; eg functional, oo, concatenative and distributed/actor. Mercury/Oz mentioned by Mahmud below is another great idea, they don't get nearly enough love.

silentbicycle3• 15 years ago

He's pretty weak on APLs and constraint/logic programming, too. Nothing against Matt Might, though (he's got plenty of other excellent posts!), any post like that is inherently incomplete.

nickknw• 15 years ago

Wow, thanks for the tipoff on Pharo, that's really neat. I'll have to keep an eye on that one!

joelburget2• 15 years ago

I was really surprised when I got to college and the only languages people cared about were C++ and Java. Ok, you'll also find some C#, Python, and Ruby, but nobody has heard of any of these "advanced" languages. The only thing they care about are the number of job opportunities they can get. I sometimes try to advocate for Haskell, or Scheme, or even Prolog. The response is usually "Pascal?" It's sad that these students never wonder if there's a better language, or a more fun language, or anything other than Java. It's a desert out here.

necubi• 15 years ago

I guess it really depends on what college. At my school, which tends towards the theoretical, Scheme, SML and Prolog are part of the core curriculum.

joelburget2• 15 years ago

I've been reading some blog posts here http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/ about the curriculum at Carnegie Mellon and I've been very impressed. I can't believe they're phasing out object-oriented programming! Here the faculty seem to think object-oriented is the only way. Actually I can't think of any functional programming we've been introduced to. (Or any other paradigm for that matter)

leegao• 15 years ago

o_O I don't know about you guys, but our CS affiliation requirement includes at least one semester of Functional Programming (using ML rather than Haskell, I know for sure that CMU (ML) and Berkeley (Scheme/ML) have similar requirements too). Java's seen as the bane of the world over here, especially since none of our professors are convinced that OO is more than just a little bit of syntax sugar coated over some generic imperative language (and as far as I can tell, I'm starting to agree with them).

plastics2• 15 years ago

AFAIK it is pretty common for most universities in Germany to start CS programs with either (S)ML, OCaml, Haskell or any combination of these depending upon the individual preferences of the responsible chair.

Java is (was?) pretty common for introductory OO classes. Advanced OO classes (outside of a "Software Engineering" context) though often introduce Eiffel, Smalltalk, Python, C++ and C# as well.

Depending upon your particular choice of courses, specialization etc., being exposed to Lisp, Prolog, Perl, C and R isn't uncommon either and from what I heard Scala is also starting to appear as a teaching language.

From what I heard the curriculum in France, Swiss, Austria and Denmark is very similar. So I am a bit surprised of the notion that there are universities out there where you can get a CS degree without being exposed to some functional programming.

dkersten• 15 years ago

The university I went to covered Java and x86 assembly in first year. Haskell, Prolog, MIPS assembly and more Java (for algorithms and data structures) in second year. C++(C with classes really) and yet more Java in third. Fourth year languages depended on optional courses, I did some SR[1] for concurrent programming course and matlab for DSP.

Besides x86 and Java, the other languages we covered weren't in terribly high detail, but enough to get a taster for whats out there. I would have liked more focus on a pure functional language, Haskell in our case, but overall we covered quite a lot of great material.

Most people (besides a handful of people like me who like non-mainstream languages) didn't really care much for anything but Java though, sadly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR_(programming_language)

kragen• 15 years ago

Shouldn't an article on "advanced programming languages" include at least one dependently typed language? I mean, I'm pretty slow and halting in Haskell and Erlang, but with ATS and Coq I don't even know where to start.

jbooth3• 15 years ago

Stopped reading at "once a program compiles [in haskell], it's almost certainly correct".

Haven't done any Haskell coding, but I just seriously doubt that in any language.

silentbicycle3• 15 years ago

How's stopping reading at the first thing that challenges your assumptions working for you?

herdrick2• 15 years ago

Please be nice.

jbooth, if you try Haskell out you'll be very surprised. It's often true - it's just that it takes a lot more work to get a Haskell program to compile.

DarkShikari• 15 years ago

It's far closer to true than you'd think.

In my experience writing code in Haskell, you spend about 95% of your time debugging type errors and 5% of your time debugging actual bugs. The good thing about the former is that it's effectively the compiler finding the bugs for you.

Haskell is the only language I've used (obviously, not the only one in existence) where I am not surprised when a large program works correctly on the first successful compilation.

Disclaimer: Haskell is not my main language, I'm mainly a C programmer.

VinzO• 15 years ago

ADA is also good for that.

jbooth3• 15 years ago

Yeah, so... bugs in the spec? Bugs resulting from i/o, unexpected input, wackiness of underlying system calls, things like that?

I guess I have a broader definition of bug than the author.

BasDirks• 15 years ago

It's true. Even for beginners it's ridiculously hard to compile buggy programs.

herdrick2• 15 years ago

... the Racket library is immense...

It is very impressive by the standards of relatively unpopular languages. Also the documentation is really good. But if Racket's libraries are immense, what is Ruby's and Rails'? Mega gargantuan?

nitrogen• 15 years ago

I went to the U of U for a time, and I wish I would've encountered Matt Might while I was there (it looks like our only overlap would've been Spring 2009, though). Somehow I wasn't able to effectively communicate with my advisor and/or figure out which classes on the schedule were actually cool.

calpaterson• 15 years ago

"In Haskell, programmers not yet well versed in functional program design may find they repeatedly code themselves into a corner, where they don't have access to the monad that they need. The MLs keep the side effects "escape hatch" open to patch over incomplete design, which prevents projects from coming to a sudden, unexpected "refactor-or-abort" decision point."

When I was a beginner, I did this a lot. In fact, I still do it occasionally.

Advanced programming languages

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