On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:27 AM, Connor Lane Smith <c...@lubutu.com> wrote: > Hey, > > 2011/12/13 Hadrian Węgrzynowski <hadr...@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.tw...@gmail.com "while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." -- attempted insult seen on slashdot
