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

On Mon, 10 May 2010, Rodney D Price wrote:

> Just my opinion...
>
> You sound as if you are looking for an ecosystem, rather than just a
> language.  If you've been working in the Perl and/or PHP languages, you've
> been working in ecosystems that are alive and well.  The languages
> themselves may be awful, but the ecosystems are phenomenal.  Each has
> many, many libraries and tools to draw from.  If you intend to learn one
> language really well, it had better have an ecosystem that gives you the
> support you need.

You're right of course! Perl, with its CPAN and NG are awesome
resources for noobs and gurus alike. ditto for PHP and others. For me
those were 2 cases where the community was outstanding, but the
languages - although I learned them - weren't intuitive for me. Kinda
like, I may love Chinese culture, food, the people, etc - but I just
can't grok the language. Would be hard to be super productive in the
heartland of Taiwan where no English might be spoken. ;) So I'm
looking for both a language that's intuitive _to me_, c/w a vibrant
community.

>
> Here are a few suggestions:
>
> (1) Haskell.  The majority of the research in functional programming
> languages is done in Haskell, a descendant of Miranda.  Miranda attempted
> to make a go is it as a commercial product, but the lack of an open system
> persuaded the functional programming community build their own: Haskell.
> You'll find that support on lists such as haskell-beginner and
> haskell-cafe is very good.  There's also a very active IRC channel,
> #haskell.  The number of packages / libraries available in Haskell has
> skyrocketed in the past few years.  See http://www.haskell.org  Haskell
> isn't as hard as the Miranda website would have you believe.

I've reading all I can about Miranda these last few days (as well as
looking at Joy). I'm sure liking Miranda! Dead (dog-go) community
though.  Research Software Ltd and http://miranda.org.uk appear to be
comatose to boot.

I do have Haskell of my MacOS X box. I'll re-visit it for sure.

> (2) OCaml / F#.  The Haskell language is an experiment in pure functional
> programming with a strong static type system.  That means no
> side-effecting functions like C's printf.  See the Wikipedia article on
> referential transparency for more.  OCaml and its descendant, F#, share
> the strong static type system of Haskell, but aren't quite as hard over as
> Haskell is about side effects.  For instance, mutable variables are
> allowed.  F# is supported by Microsoft in the new beta version of Visual
> Studio, which you can download for free at the Microsoft site.  F#'s
> ecosystem is .Net, so if you want to write code that runs primarily on
> Windows, F# is the way to go.

Interesting as well! My interest would be only in context of *nix or
MacOS X. ;)

[snip]

> (4) Factor.  If you really want to do concatenative programming, and do it
> in the real world, choose Factor.  It's the only one in the concatenative
> space that really has an ecosystem.  Go to http://factorcode.org for more.
>  I should tell you that concatenative programming is one of those areas of
> computer science that "don't get no respect."  Programming language
> researchers, especially academics, regard concatenative programming
> languages as a mostly uninteresting implementation of point-free form,
> e.g. as implemented in Haskell.

Thanks for the "heads-up" regarding concatenative programming. BTAIM,
I'll have to look a Factor in lieu of Joy.

> (5) Forth, the ultimate type-less language.  Very close to the metal, as
> you know if you've tried it.  If you're at all interested in embedded
> programming, particularly on small 8-bit or 16-bit chips, I think that
> Forth is still the best thing out there.  If you want to program anywhere
> else, in my humble opinion, don't choose Forth.  Or Joy, for that matter.
> One of the charms of Forth is that you can easily write your own Forth,
> should you be so inclined.

It has suddenly swept over me, after reading your message, that Forth
et al were indeed born and bred to excel at "controlling bare
metal". Trying to make them anything else is simply one kludge on top
of the other.

> So there is my two cents.  Do with it what you will.


Much appreciated. Just the type of dialog I needed.

-- 
Duke
A: Backwards from the way folks normally read text
A: Because it forces conversations to flow in a nonsensical order.
Q: Why is top-posting a major PAIN?
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