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The MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop

Posted by timothy on from the thin-but-good dept.

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.

2 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. Not enough Ruby by pong · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. Perl is the odd man out by tshoppa · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Interesting Dr Dobbs article, especially on the attitudes towards Perl and the attitudes by Perl developers.

    It's strange to me that Perl was even thought of as a "lightweight language". My definition of "lightweight" is that the whole language spec fits in a book no thicker than K&R 1st edition. This would barely begin to describe Perl's oddities (all reference books are filled with footnotes like "unless $/ is defined to be "\n\n" and the -ip qualifier was used to invoke Perl").

    Perl is also very different because it really is an evolved language. It's a strong testament to the overall framework that the original language could be extended into what we have today, and that the result is so widely used (even though it may not be ideal for anything, it's usable for many things).

    OTOH it also shows the signs of evolution (see my comment about all the footnotes having to deal with special cases for backwards- compatiblity.)