Re: Dylan vs Julia

On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 10:07:05 +0700
Bruce Mitchener <[email protected]> wrote:

> I've already posted about this on the Julia list and have talked with
> you off-list ... so I'll keep this short.

OK.

> Dylan and Julia are both decent languages. Julia is on the way towards
> becoming more general purpose while Dylan is moving forward in other
> ways (already being well suited for general purpose work).

Yeah, I like that feature in regard to Dylan.

> In the last year, we've been working a lot on usability, GUI bindings
> and many other things. The next year will see continued growth in
> those areas as well as hopefully improvements in our numerics and
> unicode support.

Improving unicode, iow. to have fully utf8-aware language would be
great.

> We have a lot of good documentation for our libraries, and are
> continuing to work on even more.

Indeed.

> There are differences between the two and both are evolving (although
> Dylan is evolving the language less).

I've started reading docs and arrived in 'Intro' up to 'Rest Args' (too
many afk activities) and I like what I see. Some things resemble some
Ada features, but that's probably due to Pascal's influences which I
used many years ago while I was fiddling a bit with Ada recently. :-)

> As for GUI stuff, we're getting close to having a solid Objective C
> bridge on OS X and iOS, we have good Windows bindings, some good work
> on GTK+ and I'm in the process now of building Qt bindings.

Having Qt bindings will be Dylan's killer feature 'cause *many* fine
languages are missing it making them quite unusable for writing GUI
apps - GTK+ is certainly not the answer for it these days.

> You'll probably be fine with whichever language you choose so long as
> it has the GUI bindings that you require.

For now I'll concentrate on learning Dylan and trying to see how it goes
providing higher-level (thick) Dylan bindings for my required C lib via
Melange. It will be, hopefully, a nice learning experience.

It's for sure that I do not want just thin bindings for C lib and expect
to have some type-safety for the data sending/receiving to/from C.

Sincerely,
Gour

p.s. I'll study your example from another post when I become more
familiar with Dylan so I can understand it better in the context with
Julia.


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