On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 04:06:38PM +0100, Robin Houston wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 03:36:35PM +0100, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> > I like Perl too. And C. Not so fond of Java. Am trying to learn Haskell.
> > Does that make me weird?
> No, i don't think so. But programming languages are a religious topic,
:-) Oh good.
> aren't they? Often i think people just feel threatened by things they
> don't understand. (I'll admit that my antipathy towards C++ probably
> has a lot to do with that: it's large and complex, and I've never
> had to use it in anger, so it frightens me a little.)
C++ used to frighten me, until I learnt about Perl OO, then a lot of the
syntax started to fit (as they are really quite similar) and ditto a lot
of the namespacing issues. This doesn't mean I can necessarily read and
understand it, but I have more of a chance.
> Tcl is certainly an interesting language, and notably simple to
> integrate with C. I find it starts to creak horribly if you try
Absolutely. Which is its primary purpose. What's interesting is that it
was intended for embedding in other things, rather than the tclsh, which
is what most people think of as "Tcl".
> to build large/complex systems in it, but it works well for simple
> tasks. Its use by Vignette and AOLServer as an embedded template
> language is a good application for it IMHO. (of course they're both
> moving to Java for fashion reasons now.)
Right. I've not really had to use it that much, more just that I've played
around with it, and I've not used AOLServer since very early days (just
before it became AOLServer in fact, before I switched to Apache).
> And everyone likes C, don't they? :-)
Yes and no. I love the power and flexibility of C, and then I hate the lack
of constraints :-)
Honestly, C is a nice language, because it gives you a feel for what the
machine is actually going to do with your code. - all the power and
flexibility of assembly language. :-)
> I also think Java is a decent paradigmatic OO language, that its
My big beef with Java is that having *forced* you into an OO model
(something recognised both by Perl and C++ as being bad), its own
language primitives aren't in fact objects.
And the Write Once - Run Everywhere, is more like Write Once, Debug
Everywhere.
> standard libraries are good enough, and that the power of many of its
> public APIs (the J2EE family, JAXP etc) is unparalleled. Or rather,
Yes.
> the APIs themselves may be occasionally substandard; but the fact that
> several different working implementations of them tend to exist gives
> them tremendous force. I can't imagine Perl catching up in this area
> in the near future.
True.
> I also adore Haskell. You can tell it was designed by academics (i.e.
> it's tremendously intellectually satisfying but not terribly
> *useful*); but one thing the Perl community definitely shows is that
:-)
> cool hacks can quickly become Serious Tools. Just look at the proposed
> language design for Perl 6, which includes a lot of ideas which were
> originally proposed just for their hack value. I keep meaning to look
> at ocaml, which sacrifices a little cuteness (e.g. normal order
> evaluation) for a _lot_ of performance.
I'm quite curious to try something like a data flow language, though. I'm
only just getting my head round some of the ideas in functional programming.
> Hmm.
Indeed.
MBM
--
Matthew Byng-Maddick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://colondot.net/
