Choosing a new language

[Rico Secada]

Hi.

First let me start by saying, please don't let this become a
flame-thing.

Second, I need some advice.

I am a 35 year old programmer, who program in C/C++, PHP and Bourne
Shell almost daily.

I am currently going to start focusing on becoming more skilled at a
few key languages, rather than knowing many (which I do on a more
superficial level).

My key languages are C, PHP and SH (Bourne Shell), and I have stopped
using C++ because I find that its a C-hack rather than a good design
choice.

I have made the following decision:

To study Ada and use it instead of C++. I come from a Pascal background
and I love the Ada syntax and wide area of usage. I am also attracted
to Ada because of its usage in the industry.

Now I have three more languages that I am very attracted to, but I
prefer to focus on just one of them:

Python, Haskell and Lisp.

I have been doing some reading and some coding, and I am mainly
attracted towards Lisp because of its ability to "fix a
running program".

But I find that Haskell is a more powerful language. Yet again Python
has a huge user base and many libraries, and it is implemented
everywhere, where Haskell and Lisp on the other hand hasn't.

I like the syntax of all three, and I have gotten beyond the
"confusion" stage of Lisp parentheses, so they don't bother me at all.

I need advice from people who have been coding in all three, and who
can share some views and experiences.

Please, if you don't know ALL three by deep experience, don't respond to
this thread!

Thanks and best regards!

Rico.

[bearophileHUGS]

It's not easy to answer this question, and the choice of language is
quite influenced by what's your use of it.

Python/Ruby and Java (and C#, sometimes, on Windows) are often a safe
bet today (for work purposes too), they have lot of libraries and they
are efficient enough for their purposes. But despite being flexible
those two pairs of languages have different purposes.

Haskell is a good language, it has much less libraries and today its
speed is comparable to Python/Psyco one, it may require some time to
adapt your mind tuned to older language to its nearly-pure functional
style. Today I don't think it's a language for newbies. In the future
maybe it will become more useful for work too.

Bye,
bearophile

[Stephen Leake]

George Neuner <gneuner2/@/comcast.netwrit es:

On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:54:57 -0800, John Nagle <na***@animats. com>
wrote:

> Actually, the ability to "fix a running program" [in Lisp] isn't
that useful in real life. It's more cool than useful. Editing a
program from a break was more important back when computers were slower
and just rerunning from the beginning was expensive.

Speak for yourself.

The ability to patch a running program is very useful for certain
types of embedded applications. Not every program having high
availability requirements can be restarted quickly, or can be
implemented reasonably using multiple servers or processes to allow
rolling restarts.

And in applications like IDEs, dynamically loaded functions are very
important. Improving Emacs is vastly easier because Emacs Lisp is
interpreted. You can make a small change to a function and quickly
determine its effect. That's one reason (among many others :) I have
not switched to GPS (which is written in Ada).

--
-- Stephe

[Xah Lee]

2007-12-29

Rico Secada wrote: $B!V(B... Now I have three more languages that I am very
attracted to, but I prefer to focus on just one of them: Python,
Haskell and Lisp. ... I need advice from people who have been coding
in all three, and who can share some views and experiences.$B !W(B

I have been coding all 2, namely Lisp and Python, while still dragging
my ass about learning Haskell.

as others have said, choosing a language for practical programing
largely depends on your purpose. (of course you knew that) Web
programing? PHP and Javascript and HTML/CSS and SQL/db you need. Unix
sys admin? Knowing Bash and Perl is in your favor considering the
states of the affairs. You want to do language research and AI? Lisp
and Haskell etc, of course. You want the ultimate text processor?
Emacs lisp. (beats Perl like you would beat your neighbor's child) You
want build light-sabers and spaceships in the Second Life virtual
world? Linden Script Language, is inevitable. You want to write device
drivers for Operating systems? Enduring the torture of C will benefit
you in long run.

Now, suppose your fancy brain told you that you want one to rule them
all for your kingdom of pure hobby, then the choices runs down to your
taste of course. You could, for example, imagine yourself to be the
king of bits, and enrapture yourself for the persuit to be the master
of all assembly languages. On the other hand, if you imagine to be the
supreme intellilect who wants the most high-level, expessive language
of all, with one line equals to one billion of a assembly, one million
of java, one thousand of lisp, there's Mathematica you can try. (with
few thousand dollars in your pocket to be able to begin this journey)

Sure, but you want us to comment on Python and Lisp and Haskell sans
scenarios.

In that case, my opinion is that Python sucks ass, Lisp and Haskell
rules.

Let me tell you, since you know PHP, that PHP and Perl are practically
identical in their high-levelness or expressiveness or field of
application (and syntax), and, Perl and Python are pretty much the
same except their syntax. In general, PHP, Perl, Python are the same.

(i have over years of industrial experienc with Perl and PHP since
1997, and just personal dabbling with Python since 2005. See my
tutorials here:

$B!z(B Perl and Python tutorial
http://xahlee.org/perl-python/index.html

$B!z(B PHP tutorial (meager, only started writing it this month)
http://xahlee.org/php/index.html

$B!z(B Emacs Lisp tutorial
http://xahlee.org/emacs/elisp.html

$B!z(B Linden Scripting Language tutorial (Second Life)
http://xahlee.org/sl/ls.html

O, and a Java tutorial
$B!z(B Java Tutorial
http://xahlee.org/java-a-day/java.html

)

Xah
xa*@xahlee.org
$B-t(B http://xahlee.org/

----------------------------------

Rico Secada wrote:
Hi.

First let me start by saying, please don't let this become a
flame-thing.

Second, I need some advice.

I am a 35 year old programmer, who program in C/C++, PHP and Bourne
Shell almost daily.

I am currently going to start focusing on becoming more skilled at a
few key languages, rather than knowing many (which I do on a more
superficial level).

My key languages are C, PHP and SH (Bourne Shell), and I have stopped
using C++ because I find that its a C-hack rather than a good design
choice.

I have made the following decision:

To study Ada and use it instead of C++. I come from a Pascal
background
and I love the Ada syntax and wide area of usage. I am also attracted
to Ada because of its usage in the industry.

Now I have three more languages that I am very attracted to, but I
prefer to focus on just one of them:

Python, Haskell and Lisp.

I have been doing some reading and some coding, and I am mainly
attracted towards Lisp because of its ability to "fix a
running program".

But I find that Haskell is a more powerful language. Yet again Python
has a huge user base and many libraries, and it is implemented
everywhere, where Haskell and Lisp on the other hand hasn't.

I like the syntax of all three, and I have gotten beyond the
"confusion" stage of Lisp parentheses, so they don't bother me at all.

I need advice from people who have been coding in all three, and who
can share some views and experiences.

Please, if you don't know ALL three by deep experience, don't respond
to
this thread!

Thanks and best regards!

Rico.

[j.khaldi]

Python, Haskell and Lisp.

>
I have been doing some reading and some coding, and I am mainly
attracted towards Lisp because of its ability to "fix a
running program".

Why not Erlang then?
http://www.erlang.org

[Arnaud Delobelle]

On Dec 29, 3:11*pm, Achim Schneider <[e-mail] wrote:
[...]

Lisp throws lambda calculus right into your face, which is a good
thing. Scheme might be the better choice, it's lexically scoped:http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
There are also video lectures with people with funny hats speaking wise
words.

Common Lisp has lexical scoping as well (although defvar allows you to
declare dynamically scoped variables).

--
Arnaud

[Joachim Durchholz]

Paul Rubin schrieb:

Joachim Durchholz <jo@durchholz.o rgwrites:

>Indeed. An additional case is interactive applications where setting
up the situation to be tested requires several time-consuming steps.

At least for web development, there are a lot of automated tools that
mimic user input, just for this purpose.

Yes, but it still takes time to run to the point you want.
Plus you'd need to integrate such a tool with the debugger.
Plus you'd need to record the user actions, save them somewhere, and
recall them.

None of that is rocket science, of course, but I have yet to see such a
thing. (It would be nice to have it though.)

However, for web applications, I found a far easier variant: I just
reload the page being debugged. (I have to make sure that the backend is
in the same state when reloading, but that's usually easy to accomplish.)
So web pages are one area where code modification during debugging is
less important.

Desktop programs with a large internal state are an entirely different
kettle of fish, of course.

Regards,
Jo

[John Thingstad]

På Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:16:09 +0100, skrev Joachim Durchholz
<jo@durchholz.o rg>:

However, for web applications, I found a far easier variant: I just
reload the page being debugged. (I have to make sure that the backend is
in the same state when reloading, but that's usually easy to accomplish.)
So web pages are one area where code modification during debugging is
less important.

Haveyou looked at selenium?

I quote:

Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly
in a browser, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer,
Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. No other test tool
covers such a wide array of platforms.
Browser compatibility testing. Test your application to see if it works
correctly on different browsers and operating systems. The same script can
run on any Selenium platform.
System functional testing. Create regression tests to verify application
functionality and user acceptance.

There is also a Lisp interface cl-selesium though I can't find the code on
the net now.

--------------
John Thingstad

[John Thingstad]

På Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:58:30 +0100, skrev Arnaud Delobelle
<ar*****@google mail.com>:

On Dec 29, 3:11*pm, Achim Schneider <[e-mail] wrote:
[...]

>Lisp throws lambda calculus right into your face, which is a good
thing. Scheme might be the better choice, it's lexically
scoped:http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
There are also video lectures with people with funny hats speaking wise
words.

Common Lisp has lexical scoping as well (although defvar allows you to
declare dynamically scoped variables).

--
Arnaud

More precisely defvar, defparameter, progv and (declare (special var))
create variables with dynamic scope.
let and let* do as you said use a lexical scope. (unless you use a declare
as above)
--------------
John Thingstad

[Samuel Tardieu]

>>>>"Brad" == byte8bits <by*******@gmai l.comwrites:

BradBest of luck in finding skilled, affordable Ada programmers
Bradoutside of major cities.

Which is why it may be a good idea to learn it and earn a lot of $$$ :)

[Rico Secada]

On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:56:12 +0100
Samuel Tardieu <sa*@rfc1149.ne twrote:

>>>"Brad" == byte8bits <by*******@gmai l.comwrites:

BradBest of luck in finding skilled, affordable Ada programmers
Bradoutside of major cities.

Which is why it may be a good idea to learn it and earn a lot of $$
$ :)

I have yet to see a job offering in which Ada is wanted, atleast in my
country there is none.