| repak shawahb | |||||
| I suppose I'll just have to waterboard myself | |||||
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Mon, 08 Jun 2009 In perusing the veritable cornucopia of languages mentioned in my previous post (and others), I've noticed a curious pattern: languages with formal standards are, strangely enough, the ones most likely to have several competing, somewhat incompatible implementations. Languages like Standard ML, Common Lisp, Haskell, Scheme, and C are all standards-based, and yet their respective compiler/interpreter implementations have various incompatibilities. Conversely, Perl and OCaml, whose featuresets are basically defined by their implementations, have essentially one version each (OCaml has VM versus native compilation, but with common maintainers). Now, having multiple competing implementations certainly has its upsides, and I'm in no way arguing that it's bad to have a formal standard. It is really weird to consider, though: having a standard naturally encourages multiple implementations, which are almost certainly going to have at least some inconsistencies. By eschewing formal standards and adopting the perl "descriptive" (versus authoritative) documentation model, you virtually guarantee interoperability. [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] The chip taped out last Thursday; Friday I did some final cleanup stuff, and now I'm off until Friday. So now I'm just hanging out doing nothing. Not really nothing. I might go out and buy inFAMOUS at some point—the demo is freaking badass and you should stop reading this and play it immediately—but right now I'm busy. With what, you'll ask? Learning me some new programming languages. Yeah, plural—Standard ML right now, but I also plan to learn some subset of [Haskell, Erlang, OCaml]. In fact, Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang is sitting right next to me on the couch because the nice mail lady just dropped it off; first impression is that it's a very decent deal at $25. The forthcoming Erlang Programming book from O'Reilly may also be good, but Armstrong seems to be universally loved, so I'm not going to argue. The SML book I'm reading right now is one available online, Programming in Standard ML by Robert Harper. It's well written and gets you going. I burned through 10 chapters of it in a couple hours yesterday, and I've been playing around with what I've learned so far to help the syntax set in. So far, my impressions are that type inference is an astoundingly cool idea, and while SML/NJ is friendly inasmuch as it has a REPL, MLton produces code that runs substantially faster. Identical implementations of Rabin-Miller (modulo the differences in library calls) yielded a 3500x (yes, ~3.55 orders of magnitude) difference in speed. I'm pretty sure this implies that my implementation is crap and MLton is optimizing away my painful scribblings. Also with regard to SML/NJ versus MLton, the build sequence for the former is more annoying than for the latter—but that's what makefiles are for, so it's hardly worth mentioning (though the documentation on the build process is admittedly somewhat annoying). Anyway, also on the menu for SML are UNIX System Programming with Standard ML (free online) and ML for the Working Programmer (can be had for like $12 used on Amazon). The MLton.org wiki's Standard ML page and the SML/NJ literature page also list some more resources, and the SML sourceforge project has good SML basis library documentation. For OCaml, the official user's manual is free, very complete, and is well regarded. There is also Introduction to Objective Caml by Jason Hickey, which despite being distributed from the Caltech website comes with ominous redistribution warnings. Apparently Practical OCaml by Joshua B. Smith is fucking terrible, so I'm not even bothering to link it. On the other hand, OCaml for Scientists seems well regarded. You can find it in DjVu format from a few pirate websites, but please buy the book if it's any good—or steal it brazenly if it's bad, I guess. Wikipedia lists a few online tutorials in the "External links" section of the OCaml article. Among Haskell books, the best received seems to be the newish one by O'Reilly, Real World Haskell. You can read the whole thing online and perhaps even get lost in the paragraph-by-paragraph comments. I don't know enough about other resources to make specific recommendations, but the Haskell Wiki's Learning Haskell page has a bunch. While I'm nerding on programming languages, I gave F# a spin under mono and, impressively, it works. It's pretty trippy to see this pop up in an xterm: [kwantam@muon ~/Desktop/FSharp-1.9.6.16/bin]$ mono ./fsi.exe Microsoft F# Interactive, (c) Microsoft Corporation, All Rights Reserved F# Version 1.9.6.16, compiling for .NET Framework Version v2.0.50727 Please send bug reports to fsbugs@microsoft.com For help type #help;; > _ Brings me back to my old QBasic days. Speaking of which, apparently the FreeBasic project is pretty badass. I say this just in case you're missing [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] |
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