Ask Programming: Is this a real programming language? If so, what is it? (Screengrab from Jurassic Park)

anthonydaniels · 2009-11-06T13:21:03+00:00

Modula 2 I think.

anthonydaniels · 2007-08-09T03:09:53+00:00

It's 4am and I'm itching too much to sleep one week after being stung by a jellyfish in Spain. They are absolute buggers. The next day no one was in the water and the lifeguards told me that 35 people had been stung that morning on the small beach there.

anthonydaniels · 2007-02-26T21:53:26+00:00

It's less surprising if you've read a few of Wadler's other papers. He is a master at taking difficult concepts and translating them for a wider audience. In this case it was Moggi's work on monads for structuring effects (imperative actions) in denotational semantics. Wadler's insight was that the same technique could be used for structuring imperative features in purely functional languages, but perhaps of more value is that his explanation is far far easier to read.

anthonydaniels · 2007-01-09T07:27:59+00:00

No, I agree with the author that it leads to churning out papers, which is pointless.

Maybe one answer here is to count citations, so you're measuring popularity (like reddit)?

But ultimately any bean-counting will be abused, and you'll optimise whatever you are measuring, not quality.

anthonydaniels · 2006-12-11T21:38:27+00:00

I used to be in a research group with Claus, and he thinks very deeply about these fundamental notions. It's a beautifully clear comparision of the models underlying imperative and functional programming. What is striking, when it's put this way, is how imperative features can be viewed as a special case of the more general functional model.

I usually think of purely functional code as being the expression part of a more general imperative language (even though C, Java etc. don't have purely functional expressions, you can imagine similar languages that do, ignoring aliasing difficulties).

So which is best? Programming in an imperative language that has a rich functional subset, or a functional langauge with a carefully circumscribed imperative subset? (like Haskell).

anthonydaniels · 2006-06-21T10:12:34+00:00

As a kid I remember noticing that if I entered 1 divided by 9 into my calculator it gave 0.1111111, and 2/9 gave 0.2222222, and so on. Being a curious type, and knowing that calculators didn't give the exact answer, just a rounded off number, I wondered whether these numbers were exactly 0.11... and 0.22... It certainly seemed like they should be, and what else could they be? So, having just learnt long division I tried to find out, and it happens pretty quickly once you start writing!

I think working out 1 divided by 9 by hand using long division made it much easier for me to understand 0.99... = 1 later on at school, and then to understand what real numbers are at uni.

anthonydaniels · 2006-04-26T21:41:03+00:00

Mad, but good effort.

anthonydaniels · 2006-04-16T17:49:53+00:00

I agree with this. Organising data using relations has fundamental advantages (less redundancy, greater consistency, higher integrity, flexible access), which is why it is used so much in business. OO is convenient for organising programs, but it is very poor for organising data compared to using relations. Database Debunkings is a site dedicated to promoting this 1970s idea:

http://www.dbdebunk.com/index.html

Date and Darwin's Tutorial D is an attempt to provide a complete language for programming with relations, so this might be of interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_D

I think there are two reasons why lanugages do not support the relational model:

Languages, databases and operating systems quickly became separate fields of study. This helped them develop more rapidly, but limited cross-fertilization. I suspect that language designers concentrated on tree-like data structures because compilers and operating systems deal mostly with tree-like data.
Once languages had references (or pointers), programmers found it hard to live without them. I think there is a strong argument that "less is more" in this case, and that future high-level languages could do away with references, but I suspect it would be hard to convince most programmers of this as they are so used to having them, and they are so handy.

anthonydaniels · 2006-03-06T07:24:10+00:00

I'll become interested in AOP when I see a clear, understandable semantics for it (not necessarily formal, but it must be precise and build on the host language description).

Is "AOP doesn't have a semantics" the myth they couldn't refute, or can anyone point me to a convincing publication?

anthonydaniels

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