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... How have I never heard of so many of those? Out of curiosity, why would you choose to add a new language for throwaway tasks? Is the project niche enough i
by digdugdirk 2y ago
... How have I never heard of so many of those?
Out of curiosity, why would you choose to add a new language for throwaway tasks? Is the project niche enough in various areas that these languages are truly orders of magnitude better than a common alternative for the specific task? Or is it more of a "I'd like to learn this new language, might as well see how it works in production" sort of thing?
- versteegen 2y agoWell for example I decided to use Emacs Lisp to search through the FreeBasic code for certain constructs so that I could use some elisp functions I'd already written to help edit FB in Emacs. It's throwaway, noone else will ever want to edit (or probably even use) it. FB is niche enough that there isn't much tooling available for it. I did indeed add Squirrel just to try it out (I'm considering using it as a scripting language), though I wouldn't be surprised if Euphoria and XSLT were also originally used for that reason. XSLT is there for generating .html documentation. C because I needed speed but didn't want to use C++, C++ because a C++ programmer contributed, Obj-C for the Mac port, JS for the web port, x86 assembly for the original DOS version, Bash, Batch and Python for scripts... any project can quickly reach 10 languages this way.