5 ms·

No mention of Rust, which I think ought to have been a natural addition to the article?

sremani 12y ago
Author wanted to prove that Big Institutions build PLs so he sought languages that came out of huge corps and universities and Rust would go counter to his theory. pythong, ruby, perl were also not discussed as much. It is not a great article, probably for main-street consumption.
Dewie 12y ago
It's hard to imagine how they would go from discussing the conundrums of whether-to-use-braces-or-indentation, to discussing the merits of efficiency + memory safety. Though I guess they could have chosen to bring up the peculiar meaning of the semicolon in Rust.
- bjz_ 12y ago
  The semicolon as a statement separator is such a lovely thing that it would be hard to imagine Rust without it. It's sad to see that Swift and Go have gone with a statement based approach as opposed to emphasizing the composition of expressions. They feel very clunky in comparison.
  - Animats 12y ago
    The semicolon as a statement separator is such a lovely thing... That particular convention goes back to ALGOL-58. In ALGOL-58, semicolon is a statement separator. See page 14 of the ALGOL-58 report: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Algol58_preliminary_report_CACM.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Al... C goes the other way, with semicolon as a statement terminator. 56 years after ALGOL-58, we still don't have convergence on this. Wikipedia has a table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages_%28syntax%29#Statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_lang...
    - bjz_ 12y ago
      Oh interesting, I didn't know that ALGOL had that. Looking through the Wikipedia pages, it seems that Rust most likely gained it via the ALGOL->ISWIM->ML->Ocaml->Rust route. I hope it catches on in more imperative languages in the future. After using it for a while, statement terminated syntax feels so clunky in comparison. I love being able to break out into a block like: let foo = { /* do stuff */; some_expression };

Author wanted to prove that Big Institutions build PLs so he sought languages that came out of huge corps and universities and Rust would go counter to his theory. pythong, ruby, perl were also not discussed as much. It is not a great article, probably for main-street consumption.

Dewie 12y ago

It's hard to imagine how they would go from discussing the conundrums of whether-to-use-braces-or-indentation, to discussing the merits of efficiency + memory safety. Though I guess they could have chosen to bring up the peculiar meaning of the semicolon in Rust.

bjz_ 12y ago
The semicolon as a statement separator is such a lovely thing that it would be hard to imagine Rust without it. It's sad to see that Swift and Go have gone with a statement based approach as opposed to emphasizing the composition of expressions. They feel very clunky in comparison.
- Animats 12y ago
  The semicolon as a statement separator is such a lovely thing... That particular convention goes back to ALGOL-58. In ALGOL-58, semicolon is a statement separator. See page 14 of the ALGOL-58 report: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Algol58_preliminary_report_CACM.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Al... C goes the other way, with semicolon as a statement terminator. 56 years after ALGOL-58, we still don't have convergence on this. Wikipedia has a table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages_%28syntax%29#Statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_lang...
  - bjz_ 12y ago
    Oh interesting, I didn't know that ALGOL had that. Looking through the Wikipedia pages, it seems that Rust most likely gained it via the ALGOL->ISWIM->ML->Ocaml->Rust route. I hope it catches on in more imperative languages in the future. After using it for a while, statement terminated syntax feels so clunky in comparison. I love being able to break out into a block like: let foo = { /* do stuff */; some_expression };