Smart Disorganized

Tag: programming languages

  • How would you design the perfect programming language?

    Another Quora answer I should be moving here : Phil Jones’s answer to How would you design the perfect programming language?   Well, the obvious way you’d approach it, is start with a reasonable knowledge of using other languages to get a sense for their strengths and weaknesses. And start with some good role models.…

  • Future Programming on Quora

    Quora has introduced the idea of “spaces”. A kind of “blog” or curated collection of existing answers from different people, to help organize answers around particular themes. I just created a Future Programming Space to gather my answers about various ideas in the future of programming languages. I still intend to move my answers to…

  • Strange Loop 2018

    It has to be said that this year’s Strange Loop looks amazing. So many fascinating talks …

  • Expression in Programming Languages

    Source: My Quora Answer : If Clojure is so expressive, and is basically Lisp, hasn’t there been any progress in expressivity in the last 50 years? Well, as Paul Graham put it quite well, Lisp started as a kind of maths. That’s why it doesn’t go out of date. Or not in the short term.…

  • Are Languages Still Evolving Towards Lisp?

    My Quora answer to the question “Is it still reasonable to say mainstream languages are generally trending towards Lisp, or is that no longer true?“ Based on my recent experiments with Haskell and Clojure. Lisp is close to a pure mathematical description of function application and composition. As such, it offers one of the most…

  • Questions for 2014 : #3 Programming on Tablets

    Third in a series (#1, #2) of questions occupying my mind at the beginning of 2014. Which may (or may not) inform what I’ll be working on. 3) How can we program on tablets? I’m now a tablet user. I became a tablet owner at the end of 2012. For six months I played around…

  • Phenotropic Program Design

    An answer I made on StackExchange wrt ideas for Phenotropic Programming. A thought I had recently : If you used high-level ideas like Haskell’s Maybe Monad to wrap remote-procedure calls to other systems. You send a request to the server. But nothing comes back (server is broken). Or a Promise comes back (server is busy)…

  • Programming Language Features for Large Scale Software

    My Quora Answer to the question : What characteristics of a programming language makes it capable of building very large-scale software? The de facto thinking on this is that the language should make it easy to compartmentalize programming into well segregated components (modules / frameworks) and offers some kind of “contract” idea which can be…

  • Cthulhu

    My software is more or less like Cthulhu. Normally dead and at the bottom of the sea, but occasionally stirring and throwing out a languid tentacle to drive men’s minds insane. (Or at least perturb a couple of more recklessly adventurous users.) However there’s been a bit more bubbling agitation down in R’lyeh recently. The…

  • Java Hater

    Someone on Quora asked me to answer a question on my personal history of using Java. It became a kind of autobiographical confession.  I’ve never had a good relationship with Java. My first OO experience was with Smalltalk. And that spoiled me for the whole C++ / Java family of strongly typed, compiled OO languages. …