4 ms·

My annecdata: my first language after BASIC was Pascal and I worked professionally for a couple of years using Turbo Pascal, yet I preferred C. I think the rea

My annecdata: my first language after BASIC was Pascal and I worked professionally for a couple of years using Turbo Pascal, yet I preferred C. I think the reasons were (in order): verbosity and flexibility. I always hated Wirth's obsession with bloated keywords. I like conciseness (though J might be jumping the shark). The latter point is just a reflection of how awkward it is to the break the rules in Pascal, which was necessary for many real-world applications. And yes, I'm also a Rust convertee (sorry haters); I can do everything I did in C in Rust and for most parts it's more readable and frankly less work. I think my biggest regret is that while I know I could write a C compiler, I don't think I could write a Rust compiler [in my lifetime].

eggy 4y ago
I love J and APL, but April takes the cake for me[1]. APL in Lisp. I also prefer SPARK2014 instead of Rust if I am not going to use C. I've started learning Rust a few times. SPARK2014 is easier to get going for me, and it has been used to produce high-integrity software and real-world applications for over a decade, and more if you include Ada from which it sprang[2]. [1] https://github.com/phantomics/april https://github.com/phantomics/april [2] https://www.adacore.com/about-spark https://www.adacore.com/about-spark
- FullyFunctional 4y ago
  April is interesting, thanks. Aside: I worked professionally in Scheme for a few years, but Haskell (and ghci) is my favorite language (thus my handle) for experimenting with non-trivial derivations and quick one-off experiments. Rust gives me some of what I love in Haskell (type classes, polymorphic types, sum types, some type inference, rich and ergonomic library, some functional style, ...) without the sad part (space leaks, unpredictable runtime, completely insane defaults from a perf POV)
  - eggy 4y ago
    I find APL and J to be functional enough and terse to a point of beauty once you get it. Look at solutions on rosettacode.org between Haskell and J or APL to get a feel for what I am saying. Rust's syntax is a turn off, but that is a personal bias against my C background once I embraced Haskell, J, APL, Forth, Lisp, etc... SPARK2014 covers me for the things Rust is striving for with a longer legacy of doing so for real world systems. It's also a simpler syntax (Ada, Pascal).

eggy 4y ago

I love J and APL, but April takes the cake for me[1]. APL in Lisp. I also prefer SPARK2014 instead of Rust if I am not going to use C. I've started learning Rust a few times. SPARK2014 is easier to get going for me, and it has been used to produce high-integrity software and real-world applications for over a decade, and more if you include Ada from which it sprang[2]. [1] https://github.com/phantomics/april https://github.com/phantomics/april [2] https://www.adacore.com/about-spark https://www.adacore.com/about-spark

FullyFunctional 4y ago
April is interesting, thanks. Aside: I worked professionally in Scheme for a few years, but Haskell (and ghci) is my favorite language (thus my handle) for experimenting with non-trivial derivations and quick one-off experiments. Rust gives me some of what I love in Haskell (type classes, polymorphic types, sum types, some type inference, rich and ergonomic library, some functional style, ...) without the sad part (space leaks, unpredictable runtime, completely insane defaults from a perf POV)
- eggy 4y ago
  I find APL and J to be functional enough and terse to a point of beauty once you get it. Look at solutions on rosettacode.org between Haskell and J or APL to get a feel for what I am saying. Rust's syntax is a turn off, but that is a personal bias against my C background once I embraced Haskell, J, APL, Forth, Lisp, etc... SPARK2014 covers me for the things Rust is striving for with a longer legacy of doing so for real world systems. It's also a simpler syntax (Ada, Pascal).