8 ms·

Why I have no favorite programming language

58 points by ilyash 9y ago

rbanffy 9y ago
> Inconvenient/verbose work with files and processes. Yes, there are libraries for that but there is no syntax for that Why would a language concern itself with files and processes? This is precisely why libraries are for. And with languages like Ruby, you can pretty much make the syntax. > I would like to fill the gap Every time we decide the solution to a problem is a new language, we end up with two problems. There are valid reasons to invent new languages, but such a narrow domain-specific problem is not one of them.
staticelf 9y ago
Sounds like that guy needs to check out Powershell. It has a lot of the missing features that bash is missing according to the author and is a very underrated scripting language. It has support for linux and you may write Cmdlets in Python or other languages for that matter.
- yorwba 9y ago
  The guy already checked out Powershell: https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-how-it-compares-to-ngs https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-ho...
  - staticelf 9y ago
    Well several items on his list is incorrect so I don't believe he has tried it that much tbh :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hvidgaard 9y ago
I immediately think of the very relevant XKCD about standards https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Over my career as a developer I've learned to just embrace whatever I'm working on. Soon enough I learn the peculiarities of the language and framework, and I'm productive. Most of the time the productivity gain from the perfect language and/or framework is minor, compared to the time I spend thinking about a solution. Personally I'd just select a reasonably available tech, say F#, and use that if I want to write my scripts in a functional way. Over time you make your own library of useful functionality, and you don't have to fight your way around the language because you get to know it well.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  I came here to repost that XKCD if nobody else had yet. This is exactly why Powershell was invented - a desire to Replace the Shell with something Object-Oriented. Powershell passes .NET objects from function to function through the pipeline, instead of passing simply strings. (Sometimes the objects are strings, but not always).
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Have you met our lord and savior, Ammonite Shell on Scala? http://ammonite.io/#Ammonite-Shell http://ammonite.io/#Ammonite-Shell It has same terse syntax as bash but much more structured (and easy to add more) because language is powerful. The downside is its slow, but that might have changed already with Scala Native. The key is it is full scala with some extra niceties that do the stuff bash does. So you get full power of a programming language, extended down to do stuff bash does. Better approach IMO than extending a shell "up" to more and more expressive power towards a quirky programming language.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lucozade 9y ago
  The author has opinions on a number of projects in this space including Ammonite. https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-how-it-compares-to-ngs https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-ho...
  - baldfat 9y ago
    > I don't think any amount of tinkering with existing languages (maybe except a lot of it with Lisp) can make these languages as usable for shell as new language that was specifically designed to be a shell language. I really am hoping that Lisp and specifically Racket can become the tool for the DSL since that is what they do really well.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yumaikas 9y ago
ilyash, I think you should see if http://www.oilshell.org/ http://www.oilshell.org/ might be worth your time. (not the author, but I respect it's goals)
holydude 9y ago
To me it sounds like a DSL created by much more powerful language would be really better than a completely separate prog. language. But if he wants to do it why not. It's just at some point a programming language per se will be used / abused to do much more than it was designed for. And that is why even to this day we can see a lot of bash "web","automation" code glued together in the wild.
- krapp 9y ago
  >To me it sounds like a DSL created by much more powerful language would be really better than a completely separate prog. language. Yeah, isn't that the problem that Lisp macros have been the solution to for decades now?
jokoon 9y ago
I really don't understand his critique on python. Being able to do functional programming is still great. He doesn't have a lot to say about python. To be honest, python is just the greatest thing ever. It's not penetrating well because there is no money behind it like java or go. Like I said, if there was as much money spent on python that there is on js, it would be just great. Creating a good enough programming language is very hard because it requires experience in engineering and all the compromises it entails, and it also requires not trivial compsci skills. Creating a maintaining a language is hard.
- ioquatix 9y ago
  I love your enthusiasm. I agree with the points about functional programming in Python though. Help me fix this line: https://github.com/kurocha/tagged-format/blob/283d9bb1c917684724ad5d7e92f3609e33c155bc/exporters/Blender/io_tagged_format.py#L152 https://github.com/kurocha/tagged-format/blob/283d9bb1c91768... In Ruby it would be output.puts "\t\t#{vertex.join(' ')}"
  - qznc 9y ago
    What to fix about it? Looks good to me. You could use f-strings (introduced in Python 3.6) to get rid of the `.format(`. https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/ The `[str(value) for value in flatten(vertex)]` part is missing in your Ruby. I assume that happens in some method of the vertex? You could make your vertex iterable as well. Python philosophy prevents you from getting rid of the `str(x) for x in v` because "explicit is better than implicit", so join will not auto-convert stuff into strings.
  - throwaway287391 9y ago
    Since you like map, you could shorten it a bit by doing map(str, flatten(vertex)) instead of the list comprehension.
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    Only suggestion I have is not to build a list explicitly: .join(str(value) for ...)
mbrock 9y ago
I highly encourage this kind of experimentation! Unix has a long tradition of neat little languages that make system programming easier... but none of them is all that good. I planned to make a language like this myself, and still do, in the back of my mind. Ever since running into Nix and NixOS, I've felt that I have to integrate that worldview into the hypothetical language/shell design. Not sure how.
k__ 9y ago
I don't have a favourite too, but it happened to be that I know to most about the one I work with every day.
dlss 9y ago
TL;DR: OP hasn't tried haskell yet ;p
- zerr 9y ago
  Neither Perl 6.
  - ilyash 9y ago
    I'm programming-language-curious. I tried Haskell and read a lot about perl6. Haskell melts my brain. Maybe it's getting better later, I tried about 3 days. perl6 - sigils are still there (even more of them) and overall feeling is not that different from perl5 despite such great improvements as named function parameters :)
- xelxebar 9y ago
  I know you're joking, but I would really like to have the Haskell type system in my shell with suitably-typed versions of the standard utilities: sed, awk, grep, etc. I tried asking #haskell on freenode about "using ghci as a shell" and everybody thought it was a horrible idea. Oh well :(
  - kreetx 9y ago
    If what most people thought were always the way taken we wouldn't have any of the great things we have today. In other words: try using it as a shell anyway, write the needed pieces of infrastructure, and share the results! :) (There are people who've done work in this direction, but none of them haven't broken out to any significant amount of followers.)
    - xelxebar 9y ago
      Thanks for the encouragement! For those at all interested, some of the existing tools/libs in this arena are * shelly [1], * turtle [2], and * hell [3]. I currently don't have much Haskell experience, but I do keep a ghci session open, hoping that the frustrations of using it as a shell push me to both learn and create. [1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/shelly https://hackage.haskell.org/package/shelly [2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle [3] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hell https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hell
skywhopper 9y ago
Interesting points. As a long-time sysadmin; a big fan of Bash, Ruby, and Go; and a bemused observer of "we need to replace the shell!" manifestos like this one, I have long believed that the low-friction of system-level interaction you get from Bash is inextricably linked with its contradictory, confusing, and error-prone syntax. You can't have one without the other. Ruby is one step up the chain. Still easy to get going on a project, much cleaner syntax and more consistent behavior, but the abstraction separates you just enough from the OS that it's no longer trivial to interact with files, processes, and pipes, and instead there has to be an API. Then a language like Go, carefully designed to be as self-consistent and predictable as possible, but the trade-offs are enforced error handling, higher LOCs-to-functionality ratio, and the compilation cycle, and now interacting with OS-level abstractions like files and pipes becomes a major chore, not a magical puzzle of joy like Bash sometimes feels like. I wish the author good luck with his NGS, but I don't think it's possible to make something as direct as Bash that has all the other features the author wants. But more power to him for trying. Although, looking at the Github page, I get the impression the author is writing software to automate AWS deployments after getting fed up with Terraform and CM tools, rather than a Better Shell Language. Maybe it's both, but the 100% AWS example code does not remotely appeal to this AWS sysadmin.
- lsd5you 9y ago
  When the replacement of bash comes it will seem like a complete 'no-brainer'. In my opinion what should be happening is they should completely decouple the engineering from the interactive shell. The shell should just be a series of aliases and shorthands translating into something more robust. But I also think they should move away from plain text for everything as well. Almost everything in a unix system could be better served with some kind of standard system of typing. Config files, program inputs (give universal tab completion) ... etc. So I tried powershell and found it to be terrible. It seems like the implementation is killing the idea, stack traces all over the place - rather than helpful errors - and different types for file system objects (I cannot quite remember exactly what) making it hard to combine operations.
  - metaobject 9y ago
empressplay 9y ago
Being a polyglot developer is a very wise way to go. Languages are like different tools, and each job has an appropriate tool -- trying to use one language for everything is like trying to fix everything with a hammer.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mattmanser 9y ago
Funny there's no mention of Powershell, wonder if he knows about it. Even if just to learn from them what they did wrong.
- ilyash 9y ago
  > Funny there's no mention of Powershell, There is, https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-how-it-compares-to-ngs https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-ho... > what they did wrong. Syntax and overall feeling when using the language among other things.
thesz 9y ago
No haskell where embedded DSLs shine. He can implement his "ideas" easily there and then proudly present them to the world. Basically, he didn't do due diligence in PL. ;)
cup-of-tea 9y ago
While I do sometimes wish Python was even more functional, I don't understand why the author mentions map and filter when those are actually still built in. If you like map and filter then just use them. The lack of a built in identity, compose and reduce is annoying, though.
- icc97 9y ago
  He said they were second class citizens not that they didn't exist. They're slower than list comprehension. There was a performance question on SO I remember where the comprehension was 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster. Edit: Guido wanted to do away with all of map, filter, reduce and lambda in Python 3 [0] [0]: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
  - dagw 9y ago
    There was a performance question on SO I remember where the comprehension was 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster. That sounds really really weird. The worst I've seen is maybe a factor of 3-4 in some corner cases, largely related to how python does lambdas.
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    Can you find a source for the performance difference? I can't imagine why they would be different.
reacweb 9y ago
He starts creating a new language based on complaints about 5 common languages. IMHO, he should start by understanding why so many people are fond of these 5 languages and why they were so successful. Then, he should understand that people do not only have different tastes, but also different way of thinking that may imply different style of programming. A good language is often a compromise between different requirements. Personally, I start with bash for very trivial tasks. As soon as there is data to manipulate, I switch to perl. If program gets bigger and needs to be split into modules or classes, I switch to python (I am less fluent in ruby and go). Sometimes I switch to python earlier because of some libraries. If the program gets more bigger, needs to be maintained or suffers from slowness, I switch to java. My favorite language is perl, but I use the one that fits best.
- stephen82 9y ago
  If performance is your issue then use RPerl with your existing code. For more info, see http://rperl.org/performance_benchmarks_nbody.html http://rperl.org/performance_benchmarks_nbody.html
- throwme211345 9y ago
  Interesting. I also start in bash. I then move to sed|awk|bash (extremely powerful). Then I move to TCL or Python. Then I move to swig libraries for either language. Maybe C or intel asm if I miscalculate the problem. But I sometimes move to C first if speed is the issue and I have reusable code for the problem available.
dintech 9y ago
I hate them all equally.
golergka 9y ago
"Compiled" as a negative side? Really? Compiler is my best friend, and that's why I don't like interpreted languages - you have to (mostly) actually run all the code paths to make sure they're correct.
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
I'm really happy with using F# to write true microservices using the Unix Philosophy. F# makes me learn to be a better programmer and it's fun, so there's that. Coding using the Unix Philosophy gives me all the goodness that the author seems to want, all without having to install yet another shell. The only pieces of the bash shell I'm developing are the pieces that help solve the problem in front of me. Everything else is stuff that the next guy can't pick up off the web. I don't like being a fanboy. Maybe next year I'll start playing around with Haskell. But rewriting/replacing the shell? E-gads. You'd have to make a tremendously better case than this author does. (Insert long discussion here about tools, frameworks, and bad coding discipline)
naranha 9y ago
Would love to hear the author's opinion on node with async/await? I sometimes use it for sysadmin tasks, and it's quite enjoyable. Mostly due to the great ecosystem. ES is certainly not made for sysadmin tasks, but I prefer it over go/python/Ruby/Perl.
- ilyash 9y ago
  Hi. > async/await Callbacks, promises and async do not resonate with me at all. I find them inconvenient. In addition, my recent trauma is changing functions from sync to async (promises) in Node.js. We had to do it because the functionality of these functions changed. You have to change all the callers ... and their callers and so forth. I really prefer top-to-bottom execution. > Mostly due to the great ecosystem. You mean available npm packages? > ES is certainly not made for sysadmin tasks Yep, that's why it was not mentioned in the post.
freecodyx 9y ago
well, i do like go ...
grondilu 9y ago
> The Sigils syntax does not resonate with me. I'm a Perl fan and I have to say that sigils should go. Or at least become optional. Most of the times it's just one character too many. Say you want to write an anonymous function with three arguments like f(a,b,c) = a+b c In Perl (either 5 or 6), you could for instance write : sub ($a, $b, $c) { $a+$b*$c } It's not that long, but each "$" is kind of a visual stain that beclouds the variable name. To me, it would make sense for instance that read-only variables would have no sigil. It's already the case in Perl 6 for constant, since you can write : constant pi = 355/113; but if you want sigilless parameter names, you have to use a backslash : sub (\a, \b, \c) { a+b*c } which is quite ugly. Just make the sigils optional already.
throwme211345 9y ago
Garbage feedback from a prima-donna. Yay: I can't code in your crap because it's 2017 bro. Twitwit nonsense.
ryanpcmcquen 9y ago
Call me crazy but I love Bash. At my first programming job I spent months working on Ansible scripts to get a deployment project going. In hindsight, Bash would have been far more effective (for me). I eventually ended up provisioning all my own systems with shell scripts. Relevant project: https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/config-o-matic https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/config-o-matic

58 points by ilyash 9y ago

> Inconvenient/verbose work with files and processes. Yes, there are libraries for that but there is no syntax for that Why would a language concern itself with files and processes? This is precisely why libraries are for. And with languages like Ruby, you can pretty much make the syntax. > I would like to fill the gap Every time we decide the solution to a problem is a new language, we end up with two problems. There are valid reasons to invent new languages, but such a narrow domain-specific problem is not one of them.

staticelf 9y ago

Sounds like that guy needs to check out Powershell. It has a lot of the missing features that bash is missing according to the author and is a very underrated scripting language. It has support for linux and you may write Cmdlets in Python or other languages for that matter.

yorwba 9y ago
The guy already checked out Powershell: https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-how-it-compares-to-ngs https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-ho...
- staticelf 9y ago
  Well several items on his list is incorrect so I don't believe he has tried it that much tbh :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hvidgaard 9y ago

I immediately think of the very relevant XKCD about standards https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Over my career as a developer I've learned to just embrace whatever I'm working on. Soon enough I learn the peculiarities of the language and framework, and I'm productive. Most of the time the productivity gain from the perfect language and/or framework is minor, compared to the time I spend thinking about a solution. Personally I'd just select a reasonably available tech, say F#, and use that if I want to write my scripts in a functional way. Over time you make your own library of useful functionality, and you don't have to fight your way around the language because you get to know it well.

stephengillie 9y ago
I came here to repost that XKCD if nobody else had yet. This is exactly why Powershell was invented - a desire to Replace the Shell with something Object-Oriented. Powershell passes .NET objects from function to function through the pipeline, instead of passing simply strings. (Sometimes the objects are strings, but not always).

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

Have you met our lord and savior, Ammonite Shell on Scala? http://ammonite.io/#Ammonite-Shell http://ammonite.io/#Ammonite-Shell It has same terse syntax as bash but much more structured (and easy to add more) because language is powerful. The downside is its slow, but that might have changed already with Scala Native. The key is it is full scala with some extra niceties that do the stuff bash does. So you get full power of a programming language, extended down to do stuff bash does. Better approach IMO than extending a shell "up" to more and more expressive power towards a quirky programming language.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lucozade 9y ago
The author has opinions on a number of projects in this space including Ammonite. https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-how-it-compares-to-ngs https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-ho...
- baldfat 9y ago
  > I don't think any amount of tinkering with existing languages (maybe except a lot of it with Lisp) can make these languages as usable for shell as new language that was specifically designed to be a shell language. I really am hoping that Lisp and specifically Racket can become the tool for the DSL since that is what they do really well.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

yumaikas 9y ago

ilyash, I think you should see if http://www.oilshell.org/ http://www.oilshell.org/ might be worth your time. (not the author, but I respect it's goals)

holydude 9y ago

To me it sounds like a DSL created by much more powerful language would be really better than a completely separate prog. language. But if he wants to do it why not. It's just at some point a programming language per se will be used / abused to do much more than it was designed for. And that is why even to this day we can see a lot of bash "web","automation" code glued together in the wild.

krapp 9y ago
>To me it sounds like a DSL created by much more powerful language would be really better than a completely separate prog. language. Yeah, isn't that the problem that Lisp macros have been the solution to for decades now?

jokoon 9y ago

I really don't understand his critique on python. Being able to do functional programming is still great. He doesn't have a lot to say about python. To be honest, python is just the greatest thing ever. It's not penetrating well because there is no money behind it like java or go. Like I said, if there was as much money spent on python that there is on js, it would be just great. Creating a good enough programming language is very hard because it requires experience in engineering and all the compromises it entails, and it also requires not trivial compsci skills. Creating a maintaining a language is hard.

ioquatix 9y ago
I love your enthusiasm. I agree with the points about functional programming in Python though. Help me fix this line: https://github.com/kurocha/tagged-format/blob/283d9bb1c917684724ad5d7e92f3609e33c155bc/exporters/Blender/io_tagged_format.py#L152 https://github.com/kurocha/tagged-format/blob/283d9bb1c91768... In Ruby it would be output.puts "\t\t#{vertex.join(' ')}"
- qznc 9y ago
  What to fix about it? Looks good to me. You could use f-strings (introduced in Python 3.6) to get rid of the `.format(`. https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/ The `[str(value) for value in flatten(vertex)]` part is missing in your Ruby. I assume that happens in some method of the vertex? You could make your vertex iterable as well. Python philosophy prevents you from getting rid of the `str(x) for x in v` because "explicit is better than implicit", so join will not auto-convert stuff into strings.
- throwaway287391 9y ago
  Since you like map, you could shorten it a bit by doing map(str, flatten(vertex)) instead of the list comprehension.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Only suggestion I have is not to build a list explicitly: .join(str(value) for ...)

mbrock 9y ago

I highly encourage this kind of experimentation! Unix has a long tradition of neat little languages that make system programming easier... but none of them is all that good. I planned to make a language like this myself, and still do, in the back of my mind. Ever since running into Nix and NixOS, I've felt that I have to integrate that worldview into the hypothetical language/shell design. Not sure how.

k__ 9y ago

I don't have a favourite too, but it happened to be that I know to most about the one I work with every day.

dlss 9y ago

TL;DR: OP hasn't tried haskell yet ;p

zerr 9y ago
Neither Perl 6.
- ilyash 9y ago
  I'm programming-language-curious. I tried Haskell and read a lot about perl6. Haskell melts my brain. Maybe it's getting better later, I tried about 3 days. perl6 - sigils are still there (even more of them) and overall feeling is not that different from perl5 despite such great improvements as named function parameters :)
xelxebar 9y ago
I know you're joking, but I would really like to have the Haskell type system in my shell with suitably-typed versions of the standard utilities: sed, awk, grep, etc. I tried asking #haskell on freenode about "using ghci as a shell" and everybody thought it was a horrible idea. Oh well :(
- kreetx 9y ago
  If what most people thought were always the way taken we wouldn't have any of the great things we have today. In other words: try using it as a shell anyway, write the needed pieces of infrastructure, and share the results! :) (There are people who've done work in this direction, but none of them haven't broken out to any significant amount of followers.)
  - xelxebar 9y ago
    Thanks for the encouragement! For those at all interested, some of the existing tools/libs in this arena are * shelly [1], * turtle [2], and * hell [3]. I currently don't have much Haskell experience, but I do keep a ghci session open, hoping that the frustrations of using it as a shell push me to both learn and create. [1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/shelly https://hackage.haskell.org/package/shelly [2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle [3] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hell https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hell

skywhopper 9y ago

Interesting points. As a long-time sysadmin; a big fan of Bash, Ruby, and Go; and a bemused observer of "we need to replace the shell!" manifestos like this one, I have long believed that the low-friction of system-level interaction you get from Bash is inextricably linked with its contradictory, confusing, and error-prone syntax. You can't have one without the other. Ruby is one step up the chain. Still easy to get going on a project, much cleaner syntax and more consistent behavior, but the abstraction separates you just enough from the OS that it's no longer trivial to interact with files, processes, and pipes, and instead there has to be an API. Then a language like Go, carefully designed to be as self-consistent and predictable as possible, but the trade-offs are enforced error handling, higher LOCs-to-functionality ratio, and the compilation cycle, and now interacting with OS-level abstractions like files and pipes becomes a major chore, not a magical puzzle of joy like Bash sometimes feels like. I wish the author good luck with his NGS, but I don't think it's possible to make something as direct as Bash that has all the other features the author wants. But more power to him for trying. Although, looking at the Github page, I get the impression the author is writing software to automate AWS deployments after getting fed up with Terraform and CM tools, rather than a Better Shell Language. Maybe it's both, but the 100% AWS example code does not remotely appeal to this AWS sysadmin.

lsd5you 9y ago
When the replacement of bash comes it will seem like a complete 'no-brainer'. In my opinion what should be happening is they should completely decouple the engineering from the interactive shell. The shell should just be a series of aliases and shorthands translating into something more robust. But I also think they should move away from plain text for everything as well. Almost everything in a unix system could be better served with some kind of standard system of typing. Config files, program inputs (give universal tab completion) ... etc. So I tried powershell and found it to be terrible. It seems like the implementation is killing the idea, stack traces all over the place - rather than helpful errors - and different types for file system objects (I cannot quite remember exactly what) making it hard to combine operations.
- metaobject 9y ago

empressplay 9y ago

Being a polyglot developer is a very wise way to go. Languages are like different tools, and each job has an appropriate tool -- trying to use one language for everything is like trying to fix everything with a hammer.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mattmanser 9y ago

Funny there's no mention of Powershell, wonder if he knows about it. Even if just to learn from them what they did wrong.

ilyash 9y ago
> Funny there's no mention of Powershell, There is, https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-how-it-compares-to-ngs https://github.com/ilyash/ngs#have-you-heard-of-project-x-ho... > what they did wrong. Syntax and overall feeling when using the language among other things.

thesz 9y ago

No haskell where embedded DSLs shine. He can implement his "ideas" easily there and then proudly present them to the world. Basically, he didn't do due diligence in PL. ;)

cup-of-tea 9y ago

While I do sometimes wish Python was even more functional, I don't understand why the author mentions map and filter when those are actually still built in. If you like map and filter then just use them. The lack of a built in identity, compose and reduce is annoying, though.

icc97 9y ago
He said they were second class citizens not that they didn't exist. They're slower than list comprehension. There was a performance question on SO I remember where the comprehension was 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster. Edit: Guido wanted to do away with all of map, filter, reduce and lambda in Python 3 [0] [0]: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
- dagw 9y ago
  There was a performance question on SO I remember where the comprehension was 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster. That sounds really really weird. The worst I've seen is maybe a factor of 3-4 in some corner cases, largely related to how python does lambdas.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Can you find a source for the performance difference? I can't imagine why they would be different.

reacweb 9y ago

He starts creating a new language based on complaints about 5 common languages. IMHO, he should start by understanding why so many people are fond of these 5 languages and why they were so successful. Then, he should understand that people do not only have different tastes, but also different way of thinking that may imply different style of programming. A good language is often a compromise between different requirements. Personally, I start with bash for very trivial tasks. As soon as there is data to manipulate, I switch to perl. If program gets bigger and needs to be split into modules or classes, I switch to python (I am less fluent in ruby and go). Sometimes I switch to python earlier because of some libraries. If the program gets more bigger, needs to be maintained or suffers from slowness, I switch to java. My favorite language is perl, but I use the one that fits best.

stephen82 9y ago
If performance is your issue then use RPerl with your existing code. For more info, see http://rperl.org/performance_benchmarks_nbody.html http://rperl.org/performance_benchmarks_nbody.html
throwme211345 9y ago
Interesting. I also start in bash. I then move to sed|awk|bash (extremely powerful). Then I move to TCL or Python. Then I move to swig libraries for either language. Maybe C or intel asm if I miscalculate the problem. But I sometimes move to C first if speed is the issue and I have reusable code for the problem available.

dintech 9y ago

I hate them all equally.

golergka 9y ago

"Compiled" as a negative side? Really? Compiler is my best friend, and that's why I don't like interpreted languages - you have to (mostly) actually run all the code paths to make sure they're correct.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

I'm really happy with using F# to write true microservices using the Unix Philosophy. F# makes me learn to be a better programmer and it's fun, so there's that. Coding using the Unix Philosophy gives me all the goodness that the author seems to want, all without having to install yet another shell. The only pieces of the bash shell I'm developing are the pieces that help solve the problem in front of me. Everything else is stuff that the next guy can't pick up off the web. I don't like being a fanboy. Maybe next year I'll start playing around with Haskell. But rewriting/replacing the shell? E-gads. You'd have to make a tremendously better case than this author does. (Insert long discussion here about tools, frameworks, and bad coding discipline)

naranha 9y ago

Would love to hear the author's opinion on node with async/await? I sometimes use it for sysadmin tasks, and it's quite enjoyable. Mostly due to the great ecosystem. ES is certainly not made for sysadmin tasks, but I prefer it over go/python/Ruby/Perl.

ilyash 9y ago
Hi. > async/await Callbacks, promises and async do not resonate with me at all. I find them inconvenient. In addition, my recent trauma is changing functions from sync to async (promises) in Node.js. We had to do it because the functionality of these functions changed. You have to change all the callers ... and their callers and so forth. I really prefer top-to-bottom execution. > Mostly due to the great ecosystem. You mean available npm packages? > ES is certainly not made for sysadmin tasks Yep, that's why it was not mentioned in the post.

freecodyx 9y ago

well, i do like go ...

grondilu 9y ago

> The Sigils syntax does not resonate with me. I'm a Perl fan and I have to say that sigils should go. Or at least become optional. Most of the times it's just one character too many. Say you want to write an anonymous function with three arguments like f(a,b,c) = a+b c In Perl (either 5 or 6), you could for instance write : sub ($a, $b, $c) { $a+$b*$c } It's not that long, but each "$" is kind of a visual stain that beclouds the variable name. To me, it would make sense for instance that read-only variables would have no sigil. It's already the case in Perl 6 for constant, since you can write : constant pi = 355/113; but if you want sigilless parameter names, you have to use a backslash : sub (\a, \b, \c) { a+b*c } which is quite ugly. Just make the sigils optional already.

throwme211345 9y ago

Garbage feedback from a prima-donna. Yay: I can't code in your crap because it's 2017 bro. Twitwit nonsense.

ryanpcmcquen 9y ago

Call me crazy but I love Bash. At my first programming job I spent months working on Ansible scripts to get a deployment project going. In hindsight, Bash would have been far more effective (for me). I eventually ended up provisioning all my own systems with shell scripts. Relevant project: https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/config-o-matic https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/config-o-matic