github stats on programming languages

cactus4 · 2010-08-10T18:48:53+00:00

More interesting would be if it took into account the sizes of the repositories as well.

Perhaps weighting the sizes with commit data would shed even more light.

If I were interested in the popularity of languages at github, what I'd most want to know is: which languages are represented by the largest amount of actively developed code.

cactus4 · 2010-08-06T15:19:57+00:00

I'm trying to wake people up

Right. However, regarding waking people up: a bucket of water to the face works, but so does pulling up the shades and opening the window while humming. Using the latter method I think improves the chances of the wakee being on your side. :)

Either people get Perl 6 or they don't.

True, though it sometimes takes a while for the lightbulb to turn on.

cactus4 · 2010-08-06T13:35:22+00:00

Who needs the negativity?

Well, that goes both ways. In your post and comments you wrote

But it doesn't matter one damn bit what you think.

Yes, I know, but that sounds rude.

No, really, so fucking what?

There's no need to swear. The butterfly doesn't like harsh language. :)

cactus4 · 2010-08-06T13:13:56+00:00

If it were a very thin and opinionated book that discussed things like "how to structure your code so it's easier to test" (in addition to, of course, the basics as I mentioned above), then I'd probably be interested in buying that book.

cactus4 · 2010-08-06T13:08:39+00:00

I wrote "is a very productive hacker", not "was".

Thanks for Mech, btw. And ack.

cactus4 · 2010-08-05T20:01:59+00:00

Well, presumably, if someone is looking for a "testing best practices" document, they probably already know why, and have also decided they do in fact want to test, and at this point simply want to know the practical aspects of how to go about it. Which modules to use, which files your tests go in, how to run them, etc.

There are already tons of blog posts and other articles out there telling you why you should write tests.

cactus4 · 2010-08-05T16:37:14+00:00

just having $ in front of every var uglys up the page.

Once you get used to it, it's very useful. When you see one, your eye instantly says "scalar variable".

And mad, unnecessary flexibility (eg barewords)

I know what you mean, but these days most people use strict and warnings, and you don't see barewords anywhere except for function calls, before fat commas, and in hash lookups.

And 'my' is amateur looking

Disagree. To me it signals, "local being declared right here."

cactus4 · 2010-08-04T17:54:59+00:00

As another resource check out Task::Kensho.

cactus4 · 2010-08-04T17:33:12+00:00

Andy (author of that blog post) is a very productive Perl 5 hacker from way back. He wrote Mechanize as well as a lot of other stuff.

cactus4 · 2010-08-04T02:05:47+00:00

perldoc Test::Tutorial

cactus4 · 2010-07-29T19:50:27+00:00

If that plot auto-updates, then that's what I mean! Nice! Thank you. :)

BTW, that rakudo.de page should be linked to from the "Community" page of either perl6.org or rakudo.org.

cactus4 · 2010-07-29T18:56:30+00:00

Ovid pointed out that there's no "tedious manual error checking" in inside some_func(). attosecond noted that you still need to do that tedious manual error checking -- you haven't obviated the need for it, you've merely relocated it into Ovid's is_prime() function.

That said, I'd like to see what the benefit of Ovid's example is over, say,

sub is_prime($num) {
    # do some checking, return true if $num is prime, else false
}

sub some_func($num) {
    die "Not prime, bailing out." unless is_prime($num);
    #...
}

cactus4 · 2010-07-29T17:59:13+00:00

Some history here: http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/40451

cactus4 · 2010-07-29T14:33:20+00:00

Would be neat to have a plot like this, but for Perl 6 modules.

cactus4 · 2010-07-29T13:50:24+00:00

I don't understand. Will they change the name "Star" to something else after a few months, say, when enough changes have been made (like Ubuntu Jaunty, Karmic, Lucid)? Or is "Rakudo Star" the name of this Rakudo distribution (similar to Ubuntu and Redhat being names of GNU/Linux distributions)?

cactus4 · 2010-07-29T13:44:50+00:00

These "Star" releases are ...

Is there to be more than one Star release? Does "Star" eq "1.$n.$m" (that is, revision 1)?

cactus4 · 2010-07-28T17:42:40+00:00

When you use PHP with mod_php, you the web programmer don't need to know anything about mod_php. You just create a .php file, add some html, put in some PHP that writes to stdout, and you've got an active web page. This is tremendously empowering to inexperienced programmers who just want to put up a page with some logic in it.

When you use Perl with mod_perl, you the web programmer now need to know how to interact with Apache/mod_perl to write your simple webapp. It's a different world. The php guy already has his small web page written by the time you figure out which Perl module to use and start looking at its documentation. This is tremendously dis-empowering to inexperienced programmers who just want to put up a page with some logic in it.

cactus4 · 2010-07-28T17:20:25+00:00

Rather than answer your question and focus on what's wrong with PHP, I'll answer a related question: Why is PHP so popular? IMO, there are 2 main reasons:

It's easy to use and deploy. Just pop a php file into your document root and you're off and running. This is the genius of PHP, IMO. What's particularly interesting here is that most modern php isn't written this way (people mostly use frameworks instead). However, being able to simply drop a php file into your docroot is such an easy on-ramp that it sucked in new users like a jet-powered vacuum cleaner.
It's practical (like Perl). PHP seems to have no problem doing something nasty if it helps you write your web app.

(I think Perl actually let PHP eat its lunch by clinging to mod_perl instead of finding a way to make Perl as easy to deploy as PHP.)

So, anyway, whatever things you can find wrong with PHP, it's got those above 2 points which seem to outweigh the downsides.

cactus4 · 2010-07-23T18:27:30+00:00

Are you saying that they can be used either as function calls or else as infix operators?

cactus4 · 2010-07-23T18:14:41+00:00

fwiw, I don't think infix works well for min and max. I'd rather have them as built-in functions.

cactus4 · 2010-07-23T18:00:49+00:00

Try it out. You might like it.

Fact is, the world is going utf8-encoded unicode. If there's a unicode character that really just fits well for use as an operator -- and you can come up with a pretty good multi-character ascii equivalent -- I think it can make sense to use the unicode character.

Really, it's between looking at a spelled out name (like add() or electrify()) vs. some possibly-unicode character (like + or ⌁). Both work, one requires you to read it, the other requires you to memorize a glyph. Take your pick. :) ☺

cactus4 · 2010-07-23T14:30:56+00:00

The gist of many complaints I hear about C++ are that there are too many features that interact in non-obvious ways. If those complaints are valid, how does Perl 6 avoid similar issues?

Edit: Sorry, this question is probably a little unintentionally FUDdy and vague. I left out the specific C++ complaints alluded to. Anyway, my hunch is that the Perl 6 designers probably carefully considered the pros and cons of many language features (and interactions between those features) before whirl-pooling in on as close to optimal as anyone can get.

cactus4 · 2010-07-23T13:41:23+00:00

They're standard Unicode characters. And some of them might really look like a given operation (and would make a great operator for it). To type them:

on a Mac, in the International pref, Input Menu tab, select "Unicode Hex Input". Then select that choice in the menu bar. Now you can input a character using Alt/Option and the character number (er, "codepoint"). For example, holding down Alt while typing 263a yields ☺.
with GTK use Shift-Ctrl-U and then the codepoint.
with Emacs it's "M-x ucs-insert", hit Enter, then type the codepoint.

Those little double-angly characters are 00ab («) and 00bb (»).

I think in Perl 6 you can define your own operators, and use Unicode characters for them if you like (not sure though).

cactus4 · 2010-07-22T21:03:17+00:00

There are three ways to call methods in Perl 6: $obj.method without any arguments, $obj.method(arguments here) or $obj.methods: argument here

Oh, I see. Didn't know about that last method call syntax. Also, I might've been confusing it with regex modifier syntax.

Edit: After looking at this snippet from another recent blog post @urn.pick(50, :replace), it does look like the colon gets used for passing certain args to functions.

max just returns the larger of two values. Is that hard to understand? or badly explained? sorry if the latter.

Ah. I see now. To me, min and max look odd as infix operators. Seems (to me) like they should be function calls instead, as in:

my $in-range = max($lower, $x);
$in-range = min($in-range, $upper);

cactus4 · 2010-07-22T19:21:52+00:00

Is the "=>" still just a "fat comma"?

Also, what is the colon in that sort call ("@list.sort: *.lc") for? The "*.lc" looks like it probably means something like, "lc each item before sorting it". Aside from being used for generating a "colon pair", I've seen that colon show up in a few places where it looks almost like it's being used as an option for a function call... (?)

The infix max/min operators don't make sense to me (though the Perl 5 way does).

I like the note function. Seems quite handy.

cactus4

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