A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
@BoydStephenSmithJr How do you find using Haskell in a work setting? I always feel like I'm under time pressure and don't have as much as I would like to think through a design. I'm never satisfied with my Scala code for that reason and I feel like it'd feel even worse with Haskell since it's so much more concise.
Am not familiar with GMDTT, will have to check that out! So many things to learn 🤯
@abucci This is my second Haskell job and I'm sure things will depend on the organization around you, but I just do the first thing that I can think of that "will work", make it as simple / concrete / specialized as possible until I have something that compiles without warnings, and only then do I let myself generalize / abstract things. Try to stick documentation on all new top-level bindings while my motivation is fresh, and allow myself to rewrite later.
I'm currently looking at annotations / decorations to a research programming language to estimate runtime non-asymptotically (i.e. gimme a number) in a simple execution model. I thought there might be (have been) some similar projects, but I'm not really sure where to look. I vaguely remember some work on proving loop bounds (e.g. polyhedrally). Any hints?
@d_k_bo
d_k_boyou are right. I wanted to share it with my mastodon account, but then there is only the url and not the picture in the post. Maybe there is a way i didn't see. so i took the meme and credited with the source and shared it with my community. It becames funny bc @programmerhumor then reposted my repost from their meme.. so a new dimension is createt ^2
Join us tomorrow for Episode 3 of the Causal Islands Podcast!
We're speaking with special guests Jon Corbett about acimow/Cree#, his Cree programming language, and @nasser about Alb, his Arabic programming language.
@causalislands Where is the Podcast? Why do I need to signup for something? I see no indication of why you are collecting Name and Email to listen to a podcast? And when I put in a fake name and email it doesn't proceed to give me a link or any information without "confirming" that email address (that I can't confirm cause its fake)
@gregorni@nedbat@boracle You're asking for a compiler to check types that you don't specify. That's like asking a coder to write you an app without saying what you want the app to do.
@foxylad@nedbat@boracle It is possible for the compiler to infer the type of a variable based on just the code, not annotations; see my previous posts for examples:
Finished reading "Type Systems for Memory Safety" https://borretti.me/article/type-systems-memory-safety by Fernando Borretti. It is a comprehensive review of various type system features across different #ProgrammingLanguages that are used to enforce (varying degrees of) memory safety at compile time.
As expected, it talks a lot about #Rust because Rust is probably the most used PL with compile time memory safety, but it features other languages like Ada, Val and Austral as well.
An interesting read if you are interested in #compilers.
The Software Technology department at TU Delft is hiring new assistant and associate professors! This is an open call for any research field within one of our groups, so if you are a PL researcher and are interested to join us you are very welcome to apply. You can find more information about the positions and the application procedure at https://www.tudelft.nl/ewi/over-de-faculteit/afdelingen/software-technology/computer-science-open-call.
My scripting language has the concept of "everything is a string". So, to the user, it all looks like strings, but of course under the hood I want to infer types based on operations to make things faster. In the past, I've made my variables variants that can change type.
@uliwitness I do something very similar for ShapeScript. The language is strongly-typed, with values being represented by an enum (Swift's enums are really great for this), but I wanted to hide the complexities of types from the user as much as possible, so conversion to (and in some cases, from) string just happens automatically.
@nicklockwood It has no bitwise ops. Though given HyperTalk is aimed at beginners, not existing C programmers, and bit manipulation is kind of advanced, you could probably make it a built-in function. Bit manipulation itself would probably be a chunk expression (as in ‘bit 1 of myVar’, you can already do ‘line 1 of myVar’ etc.).
#BASIC#ProgrammingLanguages#ComputerScience: "Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades."
