Slashdot Mirror

jmcbain (1233044) writes "At WWDC 2014 today, Apple announced Swift, a new programming language. According to a report by Ars Technica: 'Swift seems to get rid of Objective C's reliance on defined pointers; instead, the compiler infers the variable type, just as many scripting languages do. ... The new language will rely on the automatic reference counting that Apple introduced to replace its garbage-collected version of Objective C. It will also be able to leverage the compiler technologies developed in LLVM for current development, such as autovectorization. ... Apple showed off a couple of cases where implementing the same algorithm in Swift provided a speedup of about 1.3X compared to the same code implemented in Objective C.'" Language basics, and a few worthwhile comments on LtU.

concealment writes in with an interview with a creator of the (fairly) new language Julia designed for number crunching. Quoting Infoworld: "InfoWorld: When you say technical computing, to what type of applications are you specifically referring? Karpinski: It's a broad category, but it's pretty much anything that involves a lot of number-crunching. In my own background, I've done a lot of linear algebra but a fair amount of statistics as well. The tool of choice for linear algebra tends to be Matlab. The tool of choice for statistics tends to be R, and I've used both of those a great deal. But they're not really interchangeable. If you want to do statistics in Matlab, it's frustrating. If you want to do linear algebra in R, it's frustrating. InfoWorld: So you developed Julia with the intent to make it easier to build technical applications? Karpinski: Yes. The idea is that it should be extremely high productivity. To that end, it's a dynamic language, so it's relatively easy to program, and it's got a very simple programming model. But it has extremely high performance, which cuts out [the need for] a third language [C], which is often [used] to get performance in any of these other languages. I should also mention NumPy, which is a contender for these areas. For Matlab, R, and NumPy, for all of these options, you need to at some point drop down into C to get performance. One of our goals explicitly is to have sufficiently good performance in Julia that you'd never have to drop down into C." The language implementation is licensed under the GPL. Lambda the Ultimate has a bit of commentary on the language, and an R programmer gives his two cents on the language.

The first of a few submitters, szo sent in an early report that John McCarthy passed early yesterday. Paul Graham (among others) confirmed: the news was true. And so, shortly after a fellow founder of countless language descendants, goes the founder of the Lisp tree at the age of 84.

An anonymous reader writes "Google's new language landed with a loud thud, causing lots of interesting debates about the best place to stick semicolons... An article [in InfoQ] ... looks at some of the less discussed features. Snapshots seem to bring something like Smalltalk images and allow instant startup of applications (something Java has spent the last 15 years not delivering). Isolates are like OS processes and communicate with message passing — and as the article suggests, can fix the problem of Garbage Collection pauses by splitting up the heap (sounds like Erlang). There's more, mostly about features that remove some dynamic behavior in order to make startup and code analysis easier. Maybe Dart is worth a second look?"

I'm Not There (1956) writes "Last week the news came in that Google is supposed to unveil 'Dart,' a new programming language for browser-based apps. Now an internal email from late last year describes this project as the 'high risk/high reward' path [of Google's browser development strategy]. Apps in this new language will run in a VM on browsers that support it, and can be translated to JS for other browsers. 'Performance, developer usability, and ability to be tooled' are the main characteristics of the language." The email notes that Google will be working on ECMAScript Harmony in the near term, but they describe the project as ultimately doomed by "fundamental problems" with ECMAScript. It's interesting that Google took part in abandoning ECMAScript 4, which would have been almost fully backward compatible with current implementations while solving most of the "fundamental problems" Google claims require a brand new language to fix.

phy_si_kal writes "Opa, a new open source programming language aiming to make web development transparent, has been publicly launched. Opa automatically generates client-side JavaScript, and handles communication and session control. The ultimate goal of this project is to allow writing distributed web applications using a single programming language to code application logic, database queries and user interfaces. Among existing applications already developed in Opa, some are worth a look. Best place to start is the project homepage which contains extensive documentation, while the code of the technology is on GitHub. A programming challenge ends October 17th."

setori88 writes "Programming for concurrency makes sense in developing for both large scales (cloud computing) and small (multicore CPUs). Some languages were designed for concurrency and distribution; One of those languages is Oz, which provides advanced primitives regarding concurrency and distribution. Oz is mostly declarative, a paradigm that encompasses functional and logic programming. Despite its innovative features and expressiveness, Oz never made it into the wide developer community; one reason is its unusual syntax." Read on to learn about an effort to bring Oz's concurrency features to more programmers. setori88 continues: "But first, some background: Martin Odersky, in designing the Scala programming language, recognized the need for community acceptance of the kind that Oz lacked. He designed Scala as being both close to Java (in terms of syntax and concepts) and interoperable with existing Java libraries. Today, Scala seems to be the best hope for making functional programming accessible to programmers.

Although Scala has no language feature related to concurrency, the advanced library Akka, inspired by Erlang, provides Scala programmers with concurrent and distributed concepts.

Now comes a project attempting to popularize the concurrency concepts of Oz, called Ozma. Ozma implements the full Scala specification and runs on the Mozart VM. It extends Scala with dataflow variables, declarative concurrency, lazy declarative concurrency, and message-passing concurrency based on ports. Ozma extends the duality of Scala, namely the combination of functional and object styles, to concurrent programming."

Watson Ladd writes, "The new version of the official Scheme standard has been released as a draft (PDF)." From the draft: "[This] report gives a defining description of the programming language Scheme. Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme."

An anonymous reader writes "A draft specification of the Fortress language was recently released. Developed by Sun Microsystems as part of a DARPA-funded supercomputing initiative, Fortress is intended to be a successor to Fortran. Guy Steele, a co-author of Java and member of the Fortress development team, hopes that Fortress will to 'do for Fortran what Java did for C.' Steele admits that Java isn't probably the best choice for numerical computing, and that 'it's a mistake to try to make a programming language that is all things to all people... because the needs are so diverse.' Fortress has a number of interesting features, including support for Unicode characters in code, enabling code to look more like formal mathematical expressions. More information about Fortress is given in interview with Steele, and in a talk by Steele. There's also some interesting commentary on Fortress, including some commentary by a member of the Fortress development team, in response to two stories at the programming languages weblog Lambda the Ultimate."

An anonymous reader writes "A draft specification of the Fortress language was recently released. Developed by Sun Microsystems as part of a DARPA-funded supercomputing initiative, Fortress is intended to be a successor to Fortran. Guy Steele, a co-author of Java and member of the Fortress development team, hopes that Fortress will to 'do for Fortran what Java did for C.' Steele admits that Java isn't probably the best choice for numerical computing, and that 'it's a mistake to try to make a programming language that is all things to all people... because the needs are so diverse.' Fortress has a number of interesting features, including support for Unicode characters in code, enabling code to look more like formal mathematical expressions. More information about Fortress is given in interview with Steele, and in a talk by Steele. There's also some interesting commentary on Fortress, including some commentary by a member of the Fortress development team, in response to two stories at the programming languages weblog Lambda the Ultimate."

An anonymous reader writes "A draft specification of the Fortress language was recently released. Developed by Sun Microsystems as part of a DARPA-funded supercomputing initiative, Fortress is intended to be a successor to Fortran. Guy Steele, a co-author of Java and member of the Fortress development team, hopes that Fortress will to 'do for Fortran what Java did for C.' Steele admits that Java isn't probably the best choice for numerical computing, and that 'it's a mistake to try to make a programming language that is all things to all people... because the needs are so diverse.' Fortress has a number of interesting features, including support for Unicode characters in code, enabling code to look more like formal mathematical expressions. More information about Fortress is given in interview with Steele, and in a talk by Steele. There's also some interesting commentary on Fortress, including some commentary by a member of the Fortress development team, in response to two stories at the programming languages weblog Lambda the Ultimate."