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Manuel Simoni's blog about programming (languages).
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2012
(85)
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July
(23)
- When somebody uses the word 'natural'
- When I can no longer tell whether my implementatio...
- When I read a blog post by Robert Harper
- When everybody hypes a language that I find crap
- When a new language doesn't get lexical scope right
- When I heard of Dart's type system
- When I hear they're adding features to C++
- When I finally grokked delimited continuations
- When it comes to my mind that the 1990s project of...
- When I'm about to replace an important subsystem i...
- When somebody says 'but Clojure will bring more pe...
- When I see that Ruby's parser is 10,000 lines of C
- When somebody tries to explain JavaScript's protot...
- When I see that a new language makes a difference ...
- When I mention first-class environments and fexprs...
- When I try to structure data in Scheme
- When a language designer talks about their ideas o...
- When a code base uses a directory structure deeper...
- When I read about Perl 6 semantics
- When I try to design an extension or alternative t...
- When I see that the designer of a new dynlang know...
- When somebody asks me how I added a DSL to my Lisp...
- When somebody says he doesn't like exceptions beca...
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July
(23)
Linkroll
- Alarming Development
- Alex Payne — Online Writing
- Arcane Sentiment
- Awelon Blue
- blog.might.net
- Dependent Types Reddit
- Dynamic Aspects
- eighty-twenty
- Existential Type
- Hack the Planet
- HXA7241
- Kazimir Majorinc's Lisp Notes
- Lambda the Ultimate
- Linux Weekly News
- Loper OS
- Luke Gorrie's weblog
- Making it stick.
- One Mistake After Another
- Paul Graham
- Paul Snively's Blog
- Philosophy Made Manifest
- PiLuD: Programming Language Design
- Proggit
- Real World Technologies Forums
- Send More Paramedics
- State of Code
- Stevey's Blog Rants
- Structural insight
- Subvert the dominant paradigm
- Taylor Campbell's blag
- The BileBlog
- The ByteBaker
- Trivium
- Ward's wiki
- wingolog
5 comments:
Alan Kay refers to programming today as pop culture. When I saw the rise of ruby, and I saw the so-called definition of ruby, and I saw the implementation of ruby, I had the same reaction. I just couldn't find as good a label. But that's exactly it.
I think Ruby is important because it showed that the Lisp-style mix of object-oriented, semi-functional, and (limited, in Ruby's case) metaprogramming is widely applicable.
Yes, and ruby on rails really opened the whole "polyglot" era by being so good at generating a Hello World web app. Although "polyglot" is my least favorite pop-CS word right after "homoiconic".
The big problem is ruby and rails technically have gone nowhere since. Good start, no finish.
I was programming ruby before rails came about. Back then, parse errors would sporadically appear without rhyme or reason. Add or subtract a space or newline, randomly jostle the code, and it worked again. parse.y has never gotten better in a real sense, and while the common issues have been resolved, one can only hope to approach correctness asymptotically.
The incompatible syntax change between 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 was incredible. I still cannot understand how this was not seen as obviously retarded. Point releases shouldn't be incompatible in any sense, much less on the language level.
"I think Ruby is important because it showed that the Lisp-style mix of object-oriented, semi-functional, and (limited, in Ruby's case) metaprogramming is widely applicable."
I'm not so sure. I wrote in an enterprise setting a little ruby script that parsed some xml input file, generated an in-memory ruby sexp, and translated it into a C++ program, and to my great surprise, I got remarks from coworkers and project manager asking me why I wrote Lisp!? And I didn't even use parentheses around ruby expressions as I like to do, it was plain honest Ruby.
The problem is not with the languages, it's in the minds.
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