[Freeciv-Dev] Re: curiosity

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Dec 01, 2001 at 04:20:43PM +0100, Gregor Zeitlinger wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Dec 2001, Alan Schmitt wrote:
> > How about a fast, modern language, like Objective Caml.
> It's interesting you brought up the point. Until Wednesday I thought Java
> was state of the art in programming technique, but then I read a slashdot
> article about lightweight languages. What caught my attention was that
> the research academia basically said hackers are fools because they don't
> know how to program in a proper manner. I then followed some links and
> found that there are really interesing languages and some features were
> just very appealing. Objective Caml was one of them, and one that was
> ranked 2nd on a speed test after gcc and faster than g++.

Do you mean http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/?

> I thought that this was really impressive. Even more impressing was
> that it works without any variable assignment. All loops are done
> recursively without any loss in speed (I guess the compiler makes it
> iterative). And anyone who's programmed a declarative or
> functional/logic language knows that some problems can be handled
> very neet that way.  I also found Ada which I liked for the very
> strong typing and smalltalk and eiffel for their pure OO
> character. the latter one has a very clever concept to test programs
> using pre- and postcoditions.
> 
> Having done that, I wondered if all people who use those deprecated
> languages are fools, including myself.  I came to the conclusion
> that this answer was too easy and tried to do an economical analysis
> of programming languages.  Since there is only a finite amout of
> time people are willing to learn languages (and get good at them)
> there is a tendency towards fewer languages (for the same purpose -
> and I don't mean that they are turing comlete). Thus if a new
> hackers is born, he'll decide what language to learn based on the
> likelyhood to use the language. That will be one of the popular
> ones.

> He'll get used to it, and feel comfortable with it (regardles
> whether it's good) and use that one or languages with a similar
> paradigm.

I have to agree. I learned the basic ones (pascal, c, perl, java and
c++) and made only short trips to prolog and haskell. Than I found
python and sticked with it. It is understandable and you can write
short programs which do a lot of work. I now do a lot of my personal
programming with it. I even teach it. I also looked at the ocaml
examples and found that I would need some time to fully understand
it. Maybe I find this time sometime.

> Thus the popularity of a certain paradigm can remain for a very
> long time, even if it's not state of the art.
> Another network effect is the availability of extentions/modules/packages
> for a given language. That is, IMO, one of the major reasons, C++ and Java
> are state of the art - not from a purely technical point of view - but
> from an effective one, taking into account hacker and extention
> avaliability.
> 
> If I had to choose now what language and everybody would follow me and
> port all toolkits and extentions to it and would learn and like that
> language, I would probably not choose C++ or Java - but you know how
> likely that is.

        Raimar

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