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Which other language do you want them working on? Compiled languages are out because you can't rebuild every time. What is left?

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• carlmr 4y ago
  >Compiled languages are out because you can't rebuild every time. Can't really follow your argument. Any large project in a compiled language has higher compile times, that's true, but they become manageable if you don't use header copying as your include mechanism, as is common in C and C++, and if you use a build system that allows incremental builds. Any large project in Python has a lack of compile-time guarantees leading to immense human effort in adding unit tests that would have been caught by the type system in most languages, huge debugging efforts for the resulting runtime errors that weren't caught at compile-time, etc. Also even among the interpreted languages you could do a lot better with JIT.
  • frozenport 4y ago
    In addition to rebuild times its often not possible to interact with symbols in the same way. For example, in C++ it may not be possible to rerun a snippet of code in the debugger because those sources have been compiled out or not included. Realistically this means that the interactive user experience is vastly reduced due to the compilation process filtering out and modifying the original code. OP wants us to work on other languages but its hard to imagine a substantially different language that supports the same kind of user interaction. I guess we could expand on MATLAB or Octave but what would be the benefit from enabling a slightly different syntax? I think realistically the lack of advantage or differentiation from competing languages has made the proposition of contributing to other languages much less appealing.