On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:27 AM, Connor Lane Smith <cls_AT_lubutu.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> 2011/12/13 Hadrian Węgrzynowski <hadrian_AT_hawski.com>:
>> C is the king and Go is the prince. Go needs to be more stable/mature,
>> then it will be the king.
>
> Maybe I'm biased, but I think the future is all about functional
> programming. C has its benefits by being very very low-level, but if
> you're going to include a whole bunch of new features, like GC and
> CSP, imo you may as well just go the whole hog and mix in some
> beautiful features like functional purity and type inference. I would
> think a functional language designed around efficiency could gain a
> lot from supercompilation, and would be easier to write correct
> programs in, too.
>
> (Like I say, I may be biased: my undergrad dissertation is on
> highly-optimised second-order reduction systems.)
[Standard preamble: different people write programs to do different
kinds of tasks, and it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking the
kinds of problems you tackle and trade-offs that make sense for you
are the same ones everyone else has.]
Every month or so I look at the current state of Go, and my view at
the moment is that it falls a between the two stools that matter to
me: it "auto manages" certain things with the assumption that if you
need much greater control/performance you'll actually write complete
functions, including prologue/epilogue, by hand in assembly. On the
other hand, it doesn't provide a lot of the things that I'd like in a
higher-level language for tasks where biggest difficulty is the
problem complexity rather than getting the highest possible
performance. (I suspect one of the responses from the Go designers
would be that they've tackled writing performance code with their
goroutines: just run the task on a bigger cluster of machines. Which
is fine if you're at Google, maybe a less clear choice for everyone
else...)
In some ways Scala looks like an interesting design for a new mix of
styles of program structuring, while Go looks close to "Python with
full native compliation now" (PyPy still not feature complete AIUI).
But those are the issues that make sense for my types of usage. It's a
shame Fortress appears to have terminally stalled without getting
beyond the incomplete interpeter stage...
--
cheers, dave tweed__________________________
computer vision researcher: david.tweed_AT_gmail.com
"while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." --
attempted insult seen on slashdot
Received on Tue Dec 13 2011 - 13:48:19 CET