6 ms·
Love this comment, "I'm terrified of both."
by kenfromm 14y ago
Love this comment, "I'm terrified of both."
- stcredzero 14y agoThat's how you gauge the experience of a programmer: how much of the field she/he's terrified by. EDIT: I originally meant this as a joke, but seriously, if someone accurately knows where the gotchas are, that's valuable. Also note if they're biased to false positives and/or false negatives, and by how much. Are their heuristics for dealing with unknown territory efficient and likely to converge on good approximate results?
- georgeorwell 14y agoThanks guys, I guess I really have had some rough times. I like how Lisp and Assembler at the top of the hierarchy capture the two extremes. Some hypothetical language in the middle would be great, but maybe the best we can do is to straddle that point, e.g. with C++ and Python.
- willismichael 14y agoRather than straddle the middle, I think I'd go with as high-level a language as I could get, coupled with a simple low-enough-level language to get whatever performance benefits I needed. Some combo like Python/C, Clojure/Java, or maybe some other lisp dialect and C.
- nkorth 14y agoLua is known for pairing really well with C.
- 16s 14y agoC++ and Python pretty much run everything, everywhere. Standard, open languages are hard to beat when you want to fully control your development stack and not worry about future control issues. I wish go was an ISO standard like C++, I'd be more interested if it was.
- stcredzero 14y ago> C++ and Python pretty much run everything, everywhere. I don't think so. Last I heard, there was still a lot of COBOL out there.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dwd 14y agoCOBOL gets all the hate but if they have a Big iron mainframe then they'll most likely be running RPG.
- pjmlp 14y agoOnly if it is AS/400 based systems.
- mindcrime 14y agoRPG was more oriented towards mini-computers than mainframes, from what I recall. It's niche was the IBM S/36, S/38, AS/400 and iSeries boxes. I'm sure you probably could get RPG for your S/360 or S/390 or whatever, but from what I've seen over the years, it was mostly COBOL, PL/I, and MVS Assembler on the mainframes.
- kyllo 14y agoYes, yes there is. Most banks, and many other businesses that have been around 30+ years, are still running on COBOL. It was popular because of its highly readable syntax and its fixed-point packed decimal math for financial calculations.
- eru 14y ago> I like how Lisp and Assembler at the top of the hierarchy capture the two extremes. Not really. I'd place Agda or Coq above Lisp.
- willismichael 14y agoI'm already having a hard enough time convincing the team at work to use Clojure!
- eru 14y agoOh, Clojure is probaly more useful in practice. We also stick to a Haskell dialect at work, and don't dabble in Agda for production.
- qznc 14y agoThat is somewhat orthogonal. Lisp is better at abstraction than Agda or Coq or Isabelle or any of those ML/Haskell theorem proofers. To maintain the theme: C if you are terrified about performance Lisp if you are terrified about boilerplate Agda if you are terrified about correctness If you are terrified about all of these, then welcome to the world of engineering.
- Shamharoth 14y agoIf you are terrified about all these, there is ADA.
- stcredzero 14y agoAda. Not an acronym.
- kragen 14y agoAda gives you neither the performance of C nor the abstraction- and boilerplate-removing power of Lisp nor the provability of Agda. This is why it is not used.
- hakaaaaak 14y ago> That's how you gauge the experience of a programmer: how much of the field she/he's terrified by. I'm terrified by what I don't know, especially by what I don't know that I think I should know, to be "in the know".