Lightweight Languages

Denise writes: "'What happens if you get a bunch of academic computer scientists and implementors of languages such as Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Curl, and lock them into a room for a day? Bringing together the academic and commercial sides of language design and implementation was the interesting premise behind last weekend's Lightweight Languages Workshop, LL1, at the AI Lab at MIT.' Simon Cozens report, on perl.com, says it wasn't the flame fest you might have imagined."

Comments

Whats the "lighest" you can get?

[Anonymous Coward]

How "lightweight" a language can you produce, yet keep it usuaable?

To me, it would seem that the lighest I can come up with is:

• The ability to create variables, and assign an absolute value to them
• Comparision, with equals, is less than and is greater than
• Branches to an absolute position in the code
• Math operators + & - only
• Ouput to screen.
• Input from keyboard

So would that be usuable? A simple program such as:
VAR A
VAR B
INPUT A
INPUT B
C=A+B
PRINT C
GOTO 3

Can we get even more lightweight? :)

What about INTERCAL?

[mfarah]

I can't believe it. They talked about Perl, Scheme, Python, etcetera. Yet they didn't invite ESR to talk about the unique problems (and solutions) that implementing INTERCAL poses.

I sure hope next year's LL2 addresses this issue.

BF's second advantage.

[MarkusQ]

Bf is a lot of fun, but not light in the sense of perl or scheme. Since the article didn't define light language, I'll give it a shot. Looking at their choice of languages, light appears to mean: easy to program, easy to understand, but powerful, interpreted languages. Bf is none of the above. About all you can say for it is Turing-complete!

No, it also has the advantage that, if some poor sap goes to all the trouble to write a deamon in it, you get to smile and say "bfd!"

-- MarkusQ

P.S. It's also occasionally useful to drive a spike in "you can't do Y in language X" debates that have gotten out of hand.

I make a prediction...

[Snard]

From the review:

Paul Graham rounded off the talks by talking about his new dialect of Lisp, which he called Arc. Arc is designed to be a language for "good programmers" only, and gets away without taking the shortcuts and safeguards that you need if you're trying to be accessible.

I predict that someone will later come out with a new and improved version of this language which is backward compatible, and runs 10 times faster. That language will, of course, be called Zip.