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I note the long list of obvious examples...? :-) But sure, the world would be a better place if Rust, Go and/or Swift could fulfill that niche. I really don't
by berntb 10y ago
I note the long list of obvious examples...? :-)
But sure, the world would be a better place if Rust, Go and/or Swift could fulfill that niche. I really don't know enough. (Go seems a bit boring. Rust is too new. Swift is a bit limited re Linux etc support.)
(I've seen the claim that some C++ gurus could develop features as quick as seasoned scripters, but... how many years did it take to get to that state? :-( )
(Sorry for coming back late.)
- pjmlp 10y agoOCaml and Lisp come to mind as possible examples. Also note that for me personally, I don't see any value in using scripting languages for anything other than system administration instead of the more cryptic shell variants.
- berntb 10y agoAh, of course. I have long wondered why (Common) Lisp didn't take over the world at the end of the 90s to the beginning of the millennium. :-( They have a GC, but so do Java. There were good compilers since at least the 80s. But the lisp variants aren't really a system programming language that will replace C. (You can do bit fiddling, but... here the GC comes in, especially for embedded applications with KB of RAM. And so on.) >> I don't see any value in using scripting languages for anything other than system administration The point with scripting languages is that you can develop quickly. For applications where most time is in the DB anyway, they make a good solution. (I.e. for the last 20 years, system administration and web development.)
- pjmlp 10y agoA thing called UNIX where the source code was available for free happened, but lets forget that fact. GC bashers would be surprised how much their lifes actually depends on embedded systems running real time Java deployments.
- berntb 10y agoHuh? There were early Lisps with free source, too. Also, 1, I am not a GC basher. 2. I was wondering why Lisp didn't take over most of the world 15+ years ago. Overhead was more expensive then. (And small embedded systems will always have too little RAM.)
- pjmlp 10y agoOverhead was more expensive and there was a cheaper alternative called UNIX. I wonder how ir would have turned out if it wasn't available.
- berntb 10y agoUh... did I miss something? You don't need a lisp machine or a PDP-10 to run a lisp variant? (Do you argue that it was too late when sh had scripting? The sh is gone now, bash will probably be replaced too.)
- pjmlp 10y agoScripting via the UNIX shell is a poor man's REPL. Personally I don't remember the last time I used it for anything other than setting environment variables, for anything else there are better actual programming languages.
- berntb 10y agoI never argued anything positive about shell programming. Ever. :-) I still don't get your point, but assume you are saying that Unix is a poor replacement for a real lisp machine environment?
- pjmlp 10y agoNo, I am saying that if UNIX was available at the same price as the other OS of the time, it would never have been as successful as it was. In general, UNIX is a poor replacement for any of the OSes designed at Xerox PARC, they did at least three remarkable ones. Or at ETHZ for that matter.
- leshow 10y agoGo doesn't have any of the same safety guarantees as Rust. If you look at most production Go code, very few make use of channels, most Go code is actually locking/unlocking memory, and the Go compiler doesn't validate against data races in the same way that Rust code would. So I don't believe that Go actually makes things better, in that respect anyway.