Re: [stack] Re: Joy noob checking in!

On Mon, 10 May 2010, William Tanksley, Jr wrote:

> Duke Normandin <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The Joy language might be cool if there are still folks around that
> > can help with the learning curve.
>
> I think there are... I'm not really one, but I'll do what I can :-).
> You might be interested in one of the remote derivatives of Joy and
> Forth... Rather than go through a list, though, it might be nice to
> hear what you're looking for. Are you a minimalist? Do you like to
> work close to the machine? Or do you like the compiler to do a lot of
> heavy lifting for you? Do you want type-checking? Do you want to write
> applications, embedded systems, or an operating system? There are too
> many possible questions... Go ahead and tell us the sort of things
> you've enjoyed working on or would like to...

You've hit on one of my major "programming" quandaries. I'm an avid
hobbyist programmer searching for "my ideal" language. To add to my
cloud of confusion, I don't really know what I want to do "my
language" at the moment. I started programming in as serious manner in
the late '90s, doing HTML-CGI stuff with Perl and then PHP. Along the
way, I taught myself to use a RDBMS (MySQL and Sqlite) and Javascript.

I know that I dislike C and its derivatives, so I soon tired of Perl
and PHP. I tried Pike and don't like it.

I suppose the truest thing I can say, is that I looking for a language
which resonates with me and "feels" right, and which I take to
easily. Once I find that language, productively expressing myself with
should not be a problem, given that the language is general-purpose
enough. I realize that this goes against the prevalent thinking of
using the right tool for the job. However, programming does not come
easily enough to me, for me to be the master of many languages. I want
to learn one language _very_ well. I once thought that Forth might be
cool, because each Forth is really a problem-domain-specific
Forth. However, it might be too close to the bare metal for me.

I've recently tried Lisp via Common Lisp and newLISP. I prefer the
latter, but still not "my cup of tea".

So now I'm looking at Joy and Miranda - both functional
languages. Miranda is not stack-based.

>
> > I tried to give Forth a go, but the c.l.f. newsgroup is nothing more
> > than an ever-ending argument, and pissing contest. Hans Beezemer's 4TH
> > language should have been my first exposure to "Forth".
>
> Sigh... no kidding. I gave up on them a while ago. The MachineForth
> list is often more interesting, although naturally you have to be at
> least a little interested in minimalistic programming to stay
> interested :-). I do think that 4TH is an interesting dialect and
> implementation, yes.

Never tried the MachineForth list. I'll have to Google it. I am a
quasi-minimalist - I think. I hated Pascal, Modula, Oberon, Ada when I
looked at them because one had to write a book to get anything
done. OTOH, cryptic, obfuscated code is just so much
chicken-scratching / hieroglyphics. Should be sent to NSA / MI6 / FBI
for decoding to a natural language. ;)

Thanks for your thoughts.
-- 
duke