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There are 2 conflicting goals: 1) Having a language in which it is easy to express and try out ideas and 2) Producing fast and safe programs. A scripting lang

There are 2 conflicting goals: 1) Having a language in which it is easy to express and try out ideas and 2) Producing fast and safe programs. A scripting language would seem to be good for the exploratory scientific research, because of that. Whereas when you need to create a performant library that can do heavy crunching with reproducible results on any platform you need the other. The questions is: Do you know what you want to implement, or is that still an open question?

randomdata 3y ago
No doubt it starts as an open question and slowly moves towards knowing. Which isn't really much of a conflict. You can prove out your thoughts in a scripting language, and after the dust has settled you can move the workload to a systems language. Different jobs, different tools. I guess if you're one of those weird religious types that insist there is only one true God (read: programming language) you might feel conflict, but nobody else cares.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  > Different jobs, different tools And possibly different programmers. Say your a (non-computer-) scientist. It is not (typically) part of your job to learn Rust or Haskell. You might want to learn Rust if you are so inclined but many scientists are not.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    I'm sure there are exceptions, but generally speaking, do scientists ever really end up working on systems? Anecdotally, I work with a lot of scientists and they only write scripts. When systems are needed, they hand it off to the development team. Anyone can fumble through scripting, but there is a lot more to think about when building systems, and that's probably not something most scientists want to put effort into – for the same reasons they probably don't want to learn Rust. Realistically, learning Rust is the easiest part of becoming a systems programmer. But there is little incentive to learn any system language if your workload is always scripting in nature. You are going to, rightfully, reach for a scripting language.
coldtea 3y ago
>There are 2 conflicting goals: 1) Having a language in which it is easy to express and try out ideas and 2) Producing fast and safe programs. Why are they "conflicting"? Common Lisp could do both quite well.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  Because different languages give different focus to different features. I'm not saying there can't be a language that supports multiple goals well, but it's a bit like" Jack of All Trades".

randomdata 3y ago

No doubt it starts as an open question and slowly moves towards knowing. Which isn't really much of a conflict. You can prove out your thoughts in a scripting language, and after the dust has settled you can move the workload to a systems language. Different jobs, different tools. I guess if you're one of those weird religious types that insist there is only one true God (read: programming language) you might feel conflict, but nobody else cares.

galaxyLogic 3y ago
> Different jobs, different tools And possibly different programmers. Say your a (non-computer-) scientist. It is not (typically) part of your job to learn Rust or Haskell. You might want to learn Rust if you are so inclined but many scientists are not.
- randomdata 3y ago
  I'm sure there are exceptions, but generally speaking, do scientists ever really end up working on systems? Anecdotally, I work with a lot of scientists and they only write scripts. When systems are needed, they hand it off to the development team. Anyone can fumble through scripting, but there is a lot more to think about when building systems, and that's probably not something most scientists want to put effort into – for the same reasons they probably don't want to learn Rust. Realistically, learning Rust is the easiest part of becoming a systems programmer. But there is little incentive to learn any system language if your workload is always scripting in nature. You are going to, rightfully, reach for a scripting language.

coldtea 3y ago

>There are 2 conflicting goals: 1) Having a language in which it is easy to express and try out ideas and 2) Producing fast and safe programs. Why are they "conflicting"? Common Lisp could do both quite well.

galaxyLogic 3y ago
Because different languages give different focus to different features. I'm not saying there can't be a language that supports multiple goals well, but it's a bit like" Jack of All Trades".