05:55 pm, 25 Aug 05
language designers
Larry Wall was at Google recently and I managed to sit by him at a talk on Perl 6. Afterwards, I got to ask him: "Have you looked at Haskell?" He replied, "I don't get into the implementation." But, I explained, what I was really asking was more related to borrowing ideas; the Perl tagline is all about borrowing weird ideas from other languages, and Haskell has a bunch of weird ideas, some of which are very Perly. (Haskell is especially nice at expressing lots of program with little code in an impenetrable* way using very concise syntax -- one of Perl's areas of expertise.) But he hadn't.
I also saw the recent threads about Python removing
Both of these experiences let me down. I had expected this kind of unimaginativeness from Python (what's the distinction between statements and expressions anyway?), but I was pretty disappointed in Larry's answer, and the Perl 6 talk in general.
(...can you tell I'm writing Python code at work and getting cranky about it?)
* I say this with some sarcasm; I'm actually a fan of this. I like that experienced Perl programmers can say a lot with a little. We appreciate complexity in spoken language -- I can say "superfluous" even though a phrase like "unneeded extra" would do -- but we frown on the analogous thing in programming languages for "maintainability reasons". To me it makes no sense; it's like dumbing down the vocabulary in a book just because you expect your readers to not be able to understand it, despite the book itself being about a very complicated subject.
I also saw the recent threads about Python removing
lambda and map. It's good that they're leaving, but only because they were crippled in the first place. I wrote some code recently that involved a callback that needed to just call a function and return True, but it expanded to four lines: def timeoutcb():
self.loadimage()
return True
gtk.timeout_add(1000, timeoutcb)because a Python's lambdas are "syntactically restricted to a single expression." Even Perl got this one right: timeout 1000, sub { loadimage(); 1 }.Both of these experiences let me down. I had expected this kind of unimaginativeness from Python (what's the distinction between statements and expressions anyway?), but I was pretty disappointed in Larry's answer, and the Perl 6 talk in general.
(...can you tell I'm writing Python code at work and getting cranky about it?)
* I say this with some sarcasm; I'm actually a fan of this. I like that experienced Perl programmers can say a lot with a little. We appreciate complexity in spoken language -- I can say "superfluous" even though a phrase like "unneeded extra" would do -- but we frown on the analogous thing in programming languages for "maintainability reasons". To me it makes no sense; it's like dumbing down the vocabulary in a book just because you expect your readers to not be able to understand it, despite the book itself being about a very complicated subject.
But if you have a bare block as a statement (not being assigned or passed), then it gets run immediately.
That reminds me a little of:
var string thingy = "Hello, World"; # Simple declaration/initialisation "Hello World"; # print statement!You were ahead of the times with that one. ;)
$*SYSTEM
$.method
$lexical
Crazy.
Does simply
thingy;print it as well, or is it only for literals?
Python is such a nice long stride away from the in crowd (sigh) of ASP, JSP, PHP...
It's not too late to Rubify Google!
But yes, I realize that's not the point and lambda in python is so clunky that I rarely use it. I like javascript's syntax for closures, although JS has plenty of other problems.
Later, the conversation rambled onto why he happened to be in our neck of the woods, and what he was doing, and then to the topic of lunches and meetings with people.
He intimated that, basically, he's been asked the question "Have you seen X" so many times that he has a few canned answers to respond with that have nothing to do with the X involved. Made me sort of sad, but I guess I can understand his response.
Even in natural languages, my words will not make sense if the other person does not get the context.So are programming languages.
Natural language has an advantage that we can build the context more easily because we conciously/unconciously we use many other cues and also the context is very temporal.We may not need it at a later point. Even if we need it we can build create it by explaining it.A simple example of this thing would be short instant jokes,which evoke laughter in that context.
But in programming languages the engineering issues are important because, the context should be immedietely evident when we are reading the code, which in languages like perl is not.Unfotunately the present languages are incapable of telling us the context in which they are running.