Return-Path: Mailing-List: contact community-help@apache.org; run by ezmlm Delivered-To: mailing list community@apache.org Received: (qmail 5469 invoked from network); 10 Jan 2003 12:58:33 -0000 Received: from sccrmhc01.attbi.com (204.127.202.61) by daedalus.apache.org with SMTP; 10 Jan 2003 12:58:33 -0000 Received: from pobox.com (h00055da7108f.ne.client2.attbi.com[66.30.192.113]) by sccrmhc01.attbi.com (sccrmhc01) with SMTP id <2003011012583300100q004re>; Fri, 10 Jan 2003 12:58:33 +0000 Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 07:58:57 -0500 Subject: fu Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v551) From: Ben Hyde To: community@apache.org Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <20030110003459.A27552@lyra.org> Message-Id: <47BA7E5C-249B-11D7-8D35-003065CC5042@pobox.com> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.551) X-Spam-Rating: daedalus.apache.org 1.6.2 0/1000/N >> >>> ... Perl ... >> ... Python ... >> I can't say as I recall one of these my-language/your-language discussions ending well at any point in the last 35 years. It's very close to arguing if my life philosophy is better than yours. I think it might be better, if people want to go down that path, to broaden the discussion into one closer to comparative religion. I very much enjoyed, and still do, in depth comparative language study. When the computer science community was much less tightly connected - so that the opportunities for network effects were much weaker - there were dozens and dozens of really fascinating programming languages micro-lanaguages for specific domains. Some of my favorites... SETL (NY University) was pretty amazing. It pretty much only had hash tables. After a while they managed to get's compiler so elegant that it started to automatically optimize programs into algorithms that a few years before had seemed to be serious inventions - for example it could discover spanning tree based algorithms. As far as I know this branch of elegance has died out. There was a very amusing moment when the SETL folks wrote an Ada compiler years before anybody else managed to get one written. Simula ( which was cira 1968, had all the modern tools for writing object oriented multi-threaded programs. Almost all the neat ideas in Simula were reinvented every 2-3 years till today. This tradition is probably still alive in ELang (which takes a light dose of Prolog-fu as well). I can't too highly recommend a study of the ELang light-wieght threading model to people working on distributed systems. The SNOBOL .. ICON (University of Arizona) had some very nice ideas about how to manage the control stack of a program to get search, iteration, pattern-matching. There was a very interesting language in this line that broke the act of calling a function into it's component parts (binding, dispatching, returning etc.) and then managed to let you compose those to create iteration generators etc. I enjoyed working on a number of graphic layout languages. DOT is one of the modern examples. I bet some other people here know of some sweet historical examples. Etc. etc. etc.