Re: [stack] A Joy VM in OCaml

chris glur <[email protected]> wrote:
> This forum seems to have died.

No, it's just a slow period -- this happens from time to time. There
aren't many people carrying on active research; mine is on hiatus as
I've been working on giving a new son a start in the world.

> Perhaps others had discovered what I only now discovered:
> cat-style can be as deceptive as BASIC was in the 70s.
> You think you're programming, but you're just hacking a mess.

Unlikely. This forum is largely for research; at the present state of
the art, the research is focused on the primitives, and nobody
reasonable expects perfection from a primitive research effort. The
practical people should be hanging out in the Factor and Forth (and
possibly Postscript) groups, where they'll find pragmatic
applications.

> This forum prompted me to investigate the power of
> linux 'pipe programming',
> which is astoundingly decetive.
> It's magically easy, for small jobs, but quickly becomes unmanageable.

I suspect you were using an overly simple language, then. FP, FL,
NIAL, or Q might be a better way to carry on your experiments; they're
all based on the ideas of data pipelines, but they have strong
facilities to group, manipulate, and redirect the data, as well as the
control flow. NIAL is the only open-source one; Q (kx.com) is the only
commercially successful one. FP and FL founded not only the idea of
dataflow-centered programming, but also the entire idea of "functional
programming", which has now become a major driver of programming
languages (although not at all in the way the author intended).

> == Chris Glur.

-Wm