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The beauty of a programming language comes from being small and consistent. Such as Smalltalk, which has only 6 reserved words and implements message-passing as
by dschiptsov 13y ago
The beauty of a programming language comes from being small and consistent. Such as Smalltalk, which has only 6 reserved words and implements message-passing as if it is a function call. This is the brilliant idea of Smalltalk - message-passing + blocks + booleans and out of this everything else is implemented. Classes are of second importance, but delegating (via message passing) to parent or another object was invented here.
Scheme, on the other hand, was also minimalist and consistent - s-expressions and about dozen special forms, and out of this everything else could be implemented, including closures, continuations, and classes and message passing, if needed (CS 61A 2008 does this for you).
Haskell is.. well, everyone know what Haskell is.
As for APL, in my opinion, the power of a language comes not from using esoteric math notation, but, like in CL or Scheme, from possibility to easy add new control structures (call/cc) and special forms (with macros) or even create a new languages, such as Arc.
- rossjudson 13y agoMinimalism is oversold. K specifically eschews minimalism, providing an essential list of operators and combiners (verbs and adverbs). It's no "6-word" language. Every character is a word in other languages. We don't have six characters in the English language.
- dschiptsov 13y agominimalism in itself is not the key, but being small, consistent and good-enough is.
- kansface 13y agoRight, and the English was designed to perform the function that it does. Perhaps a sane implementation of the language would use far fewer characters.
- lttlrck 13y ago"designed" is the last word I would use to describe English :)
- jdbernard 13y agoHe was being sarcastic. I think his point is that because English was not designed it is far less efficient than it could be, and far more complicated than it need be. Therefore it is not a good language to imitate when we go to design programming languages.
- tikhonj 13y agoEveryone certainly know what Haskell is: a thin layer over a typed lambda calculus. Everybody always overestimates and oversells its complexity.
- dschiptsov 13y agoNot just that.) It is also beautiful and clever minimalist and uniform syntax, due to currying, with very reasonable conventions. Type system syntax is also clever and adopted widely. The only problem is these narcissistic hipsters, creating so much noise with meaningless blog posts about this or that way of writing abstractions. No surprise that I was confused - reading blogs instead of classic books is a waste of time leading to even more confusion.)