Damn you, AT&T, and your Unix heritage. MacOS X will never have any good games. You're not going to take away my web browser too! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Scheme never really did catch on, but it's used as a glue language in some places.
Like, say.... The GIMP.:)
I know I find it hard to progam apps in Scheme, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it. Ripping apart and parsing Scheme-style data structures is really trivial, though. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First you make it tail-recursive, then you pass your continuations, and you can break it up into data structures if needed, etc., etc...
The langauge doesn't matter that much, but Perl already has continuations and eval and lexically scoped variables and stuff built-in, so Schemers should be right at home, once they learn the syntax.;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Scheme gives you less to work with, but what it gives you is more powerful. It's sort of like giving someone a nand operator and a macro system and saying "Implement the logic yourself". It's more powerful than only giving someone and, or, and not, because that makes, say, xor pretty ugly to implement. (does Scheme have an xor? I think I ended up rolling my own...)
Yeah, you can always wrap it up in a closure; that's beautiful. I remember when our teacher showed us how to do Object-Oriented programming in Scheme with closures... I was amazed.
Heck, I don't care what your motivation was; it's just nice to discuss it. I like Scheme, the language, a lot, but I still haven't really gotten used to programming in it, and that's after spending a semester slaving away on Scheme programs and simple Scheme interpreters in Scheme...
It's just one of those things where I don't know where to start. Maybe if I had learned it earlier, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. However, it definitely helped out my recursive programming skills in general.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
call/cc? Good question. I never did use that much in my class; I don't remember if we implemented that or not. (we were writing Scheme on top of Scheme...)
I imagine it would involve calling the function with a copy of that environment. At least Perl supports continuations, but I could try to implement the lambda function anyhow... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think it's due to a lack of resources or knowledge.
I had heard of Ada when I knew Pascal, but I figured that I'd never be able to afford an Ada Compiler (or even find one...) and Turbo Pascal had object support anyhow, so what was I missing?
Of course C has its limits too, as does C++. But at least I had heard of those back then. And at least we have decent C compilers...
Also, WTF is Sather? I've played around with a few languages, but not *that* many... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh, I know; I'm just pondering the parentheses matching and conversion. I'll probably have to write routines both ways, or I could stare at Data::Dumper for a while and see if I can hack Scheme syntax into it....
I'll work on the first one if you do the third one; I don't know much about Python besides the classic whitespace vs. line noise flamewars... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, it sounds easier than writing in Lisp, at least at first. Array access in Lisp is pretty ugly, and of course figuring out how to construct a loop in either Lisp or Scheme is pretty baffling until you begin to understand...:)
And yes, once you start passing back references to anonymous functions in lists from other functions, it starts getting pretty ugly; and that's just the beginning. Then, when you try to see if that reference goes to a function, a number (or a string), another list, or something else, the fun continues...
Here was my original simple example; it gets uglier when you use more references for sublists, and then parse them. If you like native perl syntax, though, Data::Dumper works wonders...
Actually, I always thought the point of it was to get decent, optimized code... I know that gcc's optimizer does a lot better than, say, FreePascal. Of course, FreePascal produces small, static binaries, but what do you want, right? Also, p2c handles Turbo Pascal code a lot better than gpc ever did...
The code it produces is ok; there's a lot of macro, type-faking stuff in there, but I've used it to successfully port a few of my old DOS/TP/BGI Graphics Demos to Linux/C/SVGALib; I just had to write some BGI->Svgalib interface code in C.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right, I was comparing them. I've written equivalent programs in Scheme and Perl to try this out. Of course, when we're just talking about syntax, it's purely opinion-based anyhow, and Scheme basically just hides the references and does the work for you, here. I believe that the reason for this is because this functionality was bolted onto Perl later, in the spirit of adopting useful features from other languages.
In Scheme, you have to check what type something is. It isn't untyped, exactly, but you don't necessarily know what type a certain variable has until you check. If you don't check, bad things can happen. That's the disadvantage that this flexibility provides.
In Perl, you do the same thing for references, while other variable types are more explicit. I just wish those types had similar methods, but people have written this in too. (Since floats, ints and strings are all automatically converted in Perl, you have to basically write something to test if a string could also be a float or an int to see if it's a number originally. Unless there's another way to do it, of course.;)
I have nothing against either Perl or Scheme; I like them both. In fact, I was thinking about writing a Scheme interpreter in Perl, since Perl natively supports the features that Scheme requires. I just have to figure out a clean way to parse it all. The other advantages would of course be the extra libraries; Perl has a lot of awesome pre-written tools that Scheme generally lacks.:)
So, yeah, this sort of advocacy is fine until someone takes it the wrong way, and instead of listening to the arguments, has their feelings hurt. And I think that's all the article proves in the first place. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ah, but he wasn't discussing what he described. He made that argument about those idiots, and still claimed that "Language Advocacy Is Bad", but I think that all he managed to prove was that "Idiots Are Bad".
...and I think that you're trying to make the same point that I was: use the right tool for the job.
Part of advocacy has to do with presenting the facts. If you ask me if it's easy to do sytem programming tasks in C, I'll say "Hell yeah!"; if you ask me if it's easy to do threaded networked database access in C with a GUI, I'll say "Um... no, that's pretty tough, actually". And I might even recommend looking into Java, against my better judgement...:)
So, yes. Idiots are bad. Educate them. Ignore them. Flame them. But don't encourage them. And if someone asks you for your opinion, don't be an idiot either... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree, but you could make that argument about *anything*. Politics, Religion, slashdot... It's great, until it becomes petty, irrational, vindictive, you name it.
But that would be something bad about the Language Advocates, and not necessarily the concept of Language Advocacy itself.
I agree with you, BTW; back in the day, I was involved in Pascal vs. C Syntax Flamewars over in 'comp.lang.pascal.misc'. What annoyed me the most was that it was all about syntax. I mean, there's a Pascal-to-C converter, for crissake! I even found one that tried to do it the other way around, although that's tougher. Arguing over 'begin end' versus '{ }' gets old really fast.
So basically, if I'm going to argue about a language, I try not to do it based purely on syntax, which is something the present "Perl vs. Python" flamewars seem to not grasp. Believe me, both languages are ugly in their own special way, but I'd still rather hear about actual language features, as in, after the code is tokenized, what can it do... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If it weren't for language advocacy, I wouldn't find out nearly as many cool things about programming languages.
Everyone has their pet peeves, and their favorite features, and usually they have reasons for it. For instance, I don't like Java; I think it's unnecessarily bloated, contrived, and non-intuitive. So when someone showed me how simple it was to make a little GUI app, (far simpler than the text version, I might add) I was suitably impressed. I still hate Java, but I have a better idea of where it should be used, and what it can do, thanks to that advocacy.
When it comes to type systems, I like Scheme; it has a nice, clean type system. Perl can accomplish all the same nifty tricks as Scheme can, (it has closures, yay!) but you have to at least use a lot of references, and the syntax can get pretty grotty.
I used Pascal for a long time, and a decent programmer often spends a lot of time getting around the Strong Typing--it interferes with what they actually want to do a *lot*, like when they want to create a dynamic arry, for example. C at least doesn't bug you about it, but they can both pretty much accomplish the same things. I can't stand the Java type system; they definitely broke the notion of what should be an Object or not.
But that's just my opinion, and it doesn't stand in my way when I'm looking for a tool. Lately, I've been writing in C, because I've been doing Operating Systems programming for class, on Unix, in C, and it works quite well. But when I was doing web development and system administration this summer, I learned Perl and PHP, and it was far less work for what I was doing at the time. I also got to see how much work it is to implement a complex CGI in C, and although I think it'd be a neat experiment, I'd start out writing it in Perl, thankyouverymuch. I haven't had to use Java because I haven't done any real GUI programming, but I might try it out just because the API looks a little cleaner than some other GUI APIs I've seen. (I'm not about to write in straight XLib yet; even "Hello World" is huge!)
So yes, do your advocacy. Tell people which tools you like, and tell them why. Pick the right tool for the job. I don't think these things have to be incompatible. Just try to stay rational about it; that's why Linux has an Advocacy-HOWTO. When done right, it really isn't bad at all, it's quite informative, actually.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
For the record, it's "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start".:)
Also, this is third in a series? Where? Not that I'm complaining that it wasn't on the Front Page (that's fine with me) but if you're going to start posting to Features, then stay there... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, I agree that any site that sends spam should be blocked. Or, rather, destroyed in a pilliar of fire whenever possible. But if it just sells spamming software, and doesn't actually spam, I don't see a problem with that.
But then I went to their website.
My GOD, have you ever seen anything so awful?
So then I turned Java off.
There were still broken images, blinking links, I couldn't read the text...
Could we have a web proxy that blocks UGLY web pages? Becuase I'd blackhole these guys in a heartbeat!
Are they actually trying to run a business? If I saw a "business" site that looked like that, I'd run the other way!
Ugh. Unclean. Please block that site, whatever your reasoning. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I took the second (out of three) Operating System course here at state.
The first one (CSC202) is basically threads and stuff. Maybe you'll get to modify a fake scheduler; woo hoo.
The one I just took (CSC451) is pretty cool. Everything we did was usermode, but still... The course is taught in C. We wrote a typical utility (sortuniq -- roughly equivalent to 'sort | uniq -c', but as one command; I just used a binary tree), a simple file system ("MiniMinix"; it's the Minix filesystem with stuff taken out), a shell (implements pipes and redirection, but no other real metacharacters or built-ins) and a tftp client-server (that should work with real tftp; the server is threaded).
The next class, CSC452, is being discontinued in favor of CSC492, I think. This basically gets students working on projects with industry. However, I don't know what kinds of OS projects we're going to find; it should be interesting... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm a slacker, and generally my partner is too, so we both end up screwing around. But we get stuff finished in time. However, I can do that by myself, too.:)
The only thing I can think of that working in pairs might really help is the design. Since you have to agree on stuff to write code, you have to decide on a standard way to do things, and that will help you a lot more in the end... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I often find myself going to the Operating Systems lab to get stuff done, just because it's quiet, it's locked, (to only let the real nerds in) and there are lots of computers there, and comfy chairs, and a big table in the middle and stuff...
Now if only I could get to the article. Anyone have it mirrored or cached or something? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
I never got past the Apple ][ emulator in Java.
I bet Inferno doesn't have any games, either.
Damn you, AT&T, and your Unix heritage. MacOS X will never have any good games. You're not going to take away my web browser too!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Scheme never really did catch on, but it's used as a glue language in some places.
:)
Like, say.... The GIMP.
I know I find it hard to progam apps in Scheme, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it. Ripping apart and parsing Scheme-style data structures is really trivial, though.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hey, it's no big deal.
;)
First you make it tail-recursive, then you pass your continuations, and you can break it up into data structures if needed, etc., etc...
The langauge doesn't matter that much, but Perl already has continuations and eval and lexically scoped variables and stuff built-in, so Schemers should be right at home, once they learn the syntax.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Exactly; that's cheating! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Scheme gives you less to work with, but what it gives you is more powerful. It's sort of like giving someone a nand operator and a macro system and saying "Implement the logic yourself". It's more powerful than only giving someone and, or, and not, because that makes, say, xor pretty ugly to implement. (does Scheme have an xor? I think I ended up rolling my own...)
:)
Yeah, you can always wrap it up in a closure; that's beautiful. I remember when our teacher showed us how to do Object-Oriented programming in Scheme with closures... I was amazed.
Heck, I don't care what your motivation was; it's just nice to discuss it. I like Scheme, the language, a lot, but I still haven't really gotten used to programming in it, and that's after spending a semester slaving away on Scheme programs and simple Scheme interpreters in Scheme...
It's just one of those things where I don't know where to start. Maybe if I had learned it earlier, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. However, it definitely helped out my recursive programming skills in general.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
call/cc? Good question. I never did use that much in my class; I don't remember if we implemented that or not. (we were writing Scheme on top of Scheme...)
I imagine it would involve calling the function with a copy of that environment. At least Perl supports continuations, but I could try to implement the lambda function anyhow...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think it's due to a lack of resources or knowledge.
I had heard of Ada when I knew Pascal, but I figured that I'd never be able to afford an Ada Compiler (or even find one...) and Turbo Pascal had object support anyhow, so what was I missing?
Of course C has its limits too, as does C++. But at least I had heard of those back then. And at least we have decent C compilers...
Also, WTF is Sather? I've played around with a few languages, but not *that* many...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh, I know; I'm just pondering the parentheses matching and conversion. I'll probably have to write routines both ways, or I could stare at Data::Dumper for a while and see if I can hack Scheme syntax into it....
I'll work on the first one if you do the third one; I don't know much about Python besides the classic whitespace vs. line noise flamewars...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
And yes, once you start passing back references to anonymous functions in lists from other functions, it starts getting pretty ugly; and that's just the beginning. Then, when you try to see if that reference goes to a function, a number (or a string), another list, or something else, the fun continues...
Here was my original simple example; it gets uglier when you use more references for sublists, and then parse them. If you like native perl syntax, though, Data::Dumper works wonders...
Scheme:
(define descending
(lambda (n)
(cond
((zero? n) `())
(else (cons n (descending (sub1 n)))))))
(descending 10)
Perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$descending = sub {my $n = $_[0];
if (!$n){()}
else {($n, &$descending($n - 1))}
};
print "(", join " ", &$descending(10), ")\n";
Also, does this say something about Perl, or what?
Taco, you're on crack again! You couldn't post Slash to Slashdot even if you wanted to!!
...now pardon me while I insert extra text in my post to bypass the lameness filter. La de da de da...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
From the article: the title...
...so which is it?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
But, dude, C's text-handling abilities absolutely R00L! I mean, why else would they write Perl in C??? ;)
Anyhow, I agree. And I wish we could have this discussion over on Kuro5hin; it tends to be a lot more lively and intelligent for this sort of thing.
But heck, I got a few intelligent replies. Pretty good, for slashdot...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, I always thought the point of it was to get decent, optimized code... I know that gcc's optimizer does a lot better than, say, FreePascal. Of course, FreePascal produces small, static binaries, but what do you want, right? Also, p2c handles Turbo Pascal code a lot better than gpc ever did...
:)
The code it produces is ok; there's a lot of macro, type-faking stuff in there, but I've used it to successfully port a few of my old DOS/TP/BGI Graphics Demos to Linux/C/SVGALib; I just had to write some BGI->Svgalib interface code in C.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ah. So he was really just ranting about the other side of it, then.
:)
Well, I think it's at least incompatible with the article's title.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ugh. He defined TRUE as 0 and FALSE as -1?
Did he know that he was completely breaking all C semantics?
In general, I could care less, because it's easy enough to replace the #defines in the source, and go back to reading C code. But that's just evil!
I've had to do this sort of thing too, in old crappy so-called "C++ compilers" (*cough*centerline*cough*) that didn't actually have a bool type.
It should be something like this:
typedef char bool
#define true 1
#define false 0
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right, I was comparing them. I've written equivalent programs in Scheme and Perl to try this out. Of course, when we're just talking about syntax, it's purely opinion-based anyhow, and Scheme basically just hides the references and does the work for you, here. I believe that the reason for this is because this functionality was bolted onto Perl later, in the spirit of adopting useful features from other languages.
;)
:)
In Scheme, you have to check what type something is. It isn't untyped, exactly, but you don't necessarily know what type a certain variable has until you check. If you don't check, bad things can happen. That's the disadvantage that this flexibility provides.
In Perl, you do the same thing for references, while other variable types are more explicit. I just wish those types had similar methods, but people have written this in too. (Since floats, ints and strings are all automatically converted in Perl, you have to basically write something to test if a string could also be a float or an int to see if it's a number originally. Unless there's another way to do it, of course.
I have nothing against either Perl or Scheme; I like them both. In fact, I was thinking about writing a Scheme interpreter in Perl, since Perl natively supports the features that Scheme requires. I just have to figure out a clean way to parse it all. The other advantages would of course be the extra libraries; Perl has a lot of awesome pre-written tools that Scheme generally lacks.
So, yeah, this sort of advocacy is fine until someone takes it the wrong way, and instead of listening to the arguments, has their feelings hurt. And I think that's all the article proves in the first place.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ah, but he wasn't discussing what he described. He made that argument about those idiots, and still claimed that "Language Advocacy Is Bad", but I think that all he managed to prove was that "Idiots Are Bad".
:)
...and I think that you're trying to make the same point that I was: use the right tool for the job.
Part of advocacy has to do with presenting the facts. If you ask me if it's easy to do sytem programming tasks in C, I'll say "Hell yeah!"; if you ask me if it's easy to do threaded networked database access in C with a GUI, I'll say "Um... no, that's pretty tough, actually". And I might even recommend looking into Java, against my better judgement...
So, yes. Idiots are bad. Educate them. Ignore them. Flame them. But don't encourage them. And if someone asks you for your opinion, don't be an idiot either...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree, but you could make that argument about *anything*. Politics, Religion, slashdot... It's great, until it becomes petty, irrational, vindictive, you name it.
But that would be something bad about the Language Advocates, and not necessarily the concept of Language Advocacy itself.
I agree with you, BTW; back in the day, I was involved in Pascal vs. C Syntax Flamewars over in 'comp.lang.pascal.misc'. What annoyed me the most was that it was all about syntax. I mean, there's a Pascal-to-C converter, for crissake! I even found one that tried to do it the other way around, although that's tougher. Arguing over 'begin end' versus '{ }' gets old really fast.
So basically, if I'm going to argue about a language, I try not to do it based purely on syntax, which is something the present "Perl vs. Python" flamewars seem to not grasp. Believe me, both languages are ugly in their own special way, but I'd still rather hear about actual language features, as in, after the code is tokenized, what can it do...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If it weren't for language advocacy, I wouldn't find out nearly as many cool things about programming languages.
:)
Everyone has their pet peeves, and their favorite features, and usually they have reasons for it. For instance, I don't like Java; I think it's unnecessarily bloated, contrived, and non-intuitive. So when someone showed me how simple it was to make a little GUI app, (far simpler than the text version, I might add) I was suitably impressed. I still hate Java, but I have a better idea of where it should be used, and what it can do, thanks to that advocacy.
When it comes to type systems, I like Scheme; it has a nice, clean type system. Perl can accomplish all the same nifty tricks as Scheme can, (it has closures, yay!) but you have to at least use a lot of references, and the syntax can get pretty grotty.
I used Pascal for a long time, and a decent programmer often spends a lot of time getting around the Strong Typing--it interferes with what they actually want to do a *lot*, like when they want to create a dynamic arry, for example. C at least doesn't bug you about it, but they can both pretty much accomplish the same things. I can't stand the Java type system; they definitely broke the notion of what should be an Object or not.
But that's just my opinion, and it doesn't stand in my way when I'm looking for a tool. Lately, I've been writing in C, because I've been doing Operating Systems programming for class, on Unix, in C, and it works quite well. But when I was doing web development and system administration this summer, I learned Perl and PHP, and it was far less work for what I was doing at the time. I also got to see how much work it is to implement a complex CGI in C, and although I think it'd be a neat experiment, I'd start out writing it in Perl, thankyouverymuch. I haven't had to use Java because I haven't done any real GUI programming, but I might try it out just because the API looks a little cleaner than some other GUI APIs I've seen. (I'm not about to write in straight XLib yet; even "Hello World" is huge!)
So yes, do your advocacy. Tell people which tools you like, and tell them why. Pick the right tool for the job. I don't think these things have to be incompatible. Just try to stay rational about it; that's why Linux has an Advocacy-HOWTO. When done right, it really isn't bad at all, it's quite informative, actually.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
For the record, it's "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start". :)
Also, this is third in a series? Where? Not that I'm complaining that it wasn't on the Front Page (that's fine with me) but if you're going to start posting to Features, then stay there...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's what happens when things get taken for granite...
(sorry, couldn't resist!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, I agree that any site that sends spam should be blocked. Or, rather, destroyed in a pilliar of fire whenever possible. But if it just sells spamming software, and doesn't actually spam, I don't see a problem with that.
But then I went to their website.
My GOD, have you ever seen anything so awful?
So then I turned Java off.
There were still broken images, blinking links, I couldn't read the text...
Could we have a web proxy that blocks UGLY web pages? Becuase I'd blackhole these guys in a heartbeat!
Are they actually trying to run a business? If I saw a "business" site that looked like that, I'd run the other way!
Ugh. Unclean. Please block that site, whatever your reasoning.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I took the second (out of three) Operating System course here at state.
The first one (CSC202) is basically threads and stuff. Maybe you'll get to modify a fake scheduler; woo hoo.
The one I just took (CSC451) is pretty cool. Everything we did was usermode, but still... The course is taught in C. We wrote a typical utility (sortuniq -- roughly equivalent to 'sort | uniq -c', but as one command; I just used a binary tree), a simple file system ("MiniMinix"; it's the Minix filesystem with stuff taken out), a shell (implements pipes and redirection, but no other real metacharacters or built-ins) and a tftp client-server (that should work with real tftp; the server is threaded).
The next class, CSC452, is being discontinued in favor of CSC492, I think. This basically gets students working on projects with industry. However, I don't know what kinds of OS projects we're going to find; it should be interesting...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's all you had to say; I'm going back there!
Now who's next? Yahoo?
Damn cheesy portal sites.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Nah.
:)
I'm a slacker, and generally my partner is too, so we both end up screwing around. But we get stuff finished in time. However, I can do that by myself, too.
The only thing I can think of that working in pairs might really help is the design. Since you have to agree on stuff to write code, you have to decide on a standard way to do things, and that will help you a lot more in the end...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I can believe that.
I often find myself going to the Operating Systems lab to get stuff done, just because it's quiet, it's locked, (to only let the real nerds in) and there are lots of computers there, and comfy chairs, and a big table in the middle and stuff...
Now if only I could get to the article. Anyone have it mirrored or cached or something?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.