The MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop

fxn points to this "article from Dr. Dobbs's Jounal on the recent Lightweight Languages Workshop, held at MIT's AI Lab." This is a nice followup to Simon Cozen's report on the conference, posted here in November.

Comments

Not enough Ruby

[pong]

Honestly, I think Perl is the ultimate light weight language, as it is not (in my opinion) suited for anything but lightweight tasks. Use perl for the things that you used to do with sed, awk and bash, and perhaps a few things that you didn't bother doing with those tools because it is too messy.

Joking aside, I really recommend developers who care about efficiency (not runtime :-)) to learn ruby. Its extremely expressive and very maintainable. Too bad it got so little attention at that conference.

What is a lightweight language?

[angel'o'sphere]

All languages mentioned in the article are "interpreted" languages. But I asume there is more which is needed to define a language as lightweight.

IMHO a language should be easy to learn, consistent in the forms how control structures and declarations are applied and the various concepts of the language should fir orthogonal together.

Perl, e.g. is not a easy to learn language.
Especial if you neither know sed, awk etc. (who even of the /. ers is today fluent in those anyway?)

So: can a language wich has a runtime environment of several tenth of megabytes be considered lightweight?

I would argue light weight languages do not even exist. Probably AppleScript or HyperCard is the only language I would consider leightweight.

Well, LISP and Co., why not. But those are for me hard to read and hard to work with, wrong mindset I asume.

Just my 2 cents (now we have those in Europe also!, yeah!)

Regards,
angel'o'sphere