Clean Programming Language: the insanely great, the weird and the short-sighted

http://fpmatters.blogspot.com/2009/04/clean-programming-language-insanely.html

by nreece • 17 years ago

35 17 17 years ago

fpmatters.blogspot.com

eelco2• 17 years ago

He's forgetting one important thing. Compared to other functional languages Clean has virtually no community. That said, the things they (the language developers) can build are pretty impressive. Their iTasks workflow system (unfortunately there is only a very old web page online, but I've seen a recent demo at a conference) is very cool.

trjordan• 17 years ago

This has always struck me as kind of strange.

Many, if not all, languages are defined in large part by their communities. Java is for the unwashed masses, Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics, Haskell is friendly, brilliant, and (for the most part) ignored. It almost seems like languages are just touchstones around which to build a community (by writing libraries, frameworks, etc.). The differences between the actual languages seem much less important that the idioms within the languages.

(For the record: I know Python, MATLAB, Lisp, and Java.)

jmillikin• 17 years ago

> Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics

I think this applies more to Rails. I've found the Ruby community outside of Rails to be quite sane people.

plinkplonk• 17 years ago

"languages are defined in large part by their communities"

For the longest time, Clean wasn't open sourced. These days, the chances of a non open source language gathering a strong community around it is hard (except maybe for Microsoft languages), and even when a community forms, it is likely to remain small. I for one, would never put my time in to a community around a closed source language.

eelco2• 17 years ago

I don't think you can build a community by just writing libraries, frameworks, etc. ;) The crucial (and hard) part is getting people from the outside involved, so that you _don't_ have to write everything yourself, but it will turn into a 'community effort'.

The team working on Clean is pretty small. Currently there are some efforts to make it more friendly and welcoming for other people to join.

sho5• 17 years ago

"Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics"

Look, what is so innately wrong with monkey-patching? You mention it in a distinctly perjorative tone, but why? Yes it can be used badly, but it can also be bloody brilliant.

Bad monkey-patching: touching any method defined in core.

Good monkey-patching:

  class Array
  
    def to_sentence
      return "I contain #{self[0..-2].map {|x| x.to_s + ', '}}and #{self[-1]}."
    end

  end

Seriously, being able to do throw that kind of thing into the beginning of your program, extend the core classes just like that, is frickin' awesome.

People abuse it, yes, like people abuse any power they're given. Just last week I wasted several hours trying to fix some strange ActiveRecord errors which turned out to be the morons in Rails Core monkeypatching Hash#to_json; my solution ended up being monkeypatching it straight back. Great. Obviously, I wish I didn't have to do that kind of thing.

However - don't blame the technique, blame the people who misuse it. Used properly, it can be a dream come true. Always wish that Time could print to string including milliseconds? Baby, I've got Time#to_s_usecs for you in three lines of code.

Monkeypatching is a sharp knife - you can cut your bread or you can cut yourself. Either way, it's not the knife's fault. And either way, I'd rather have a knife than not have one : )

Clean Programming Language: the insanely great, the weird and the short-sighted

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