From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson) Date: 2004-06-11T03:53:39+09:00 Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Unit tests ... not just for the young In article <40C898AF.8000706@zesiger.com>, Tyler Zesiger wrote: >Ruby and Dylan kind of remind me of each other. They were both conceived >at about the same time. Dylan is designed to be a "production" language, >capable of replacing C/C++. I'm just barely getting into it, but I liked >it better than Eiffel, and it seems to have a great future even though >it's largely ignored so far. It consistently ranks well in the ICFP >lanugages contest - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/proj/plclub/contest/ - But >as far as I know, there's not much production code written using Dylan. > >Apple had financial troubles and dropped the Dylan project. Bob Dylan >won millions of dollars out of a lawsuit over the fact that Dylan was >distributed on a CD with the word "Dylan" on the front. And Dylan seems >to be only now catching up to where it should have been in the mid 1990's. Now days Apple uses Objective C quite a lot. They don't seem to be doing anything with Dylan anymore. > >Anyways, Dylan, Ruby, and Scheme are the languages I've decided to be >worthwhile, in that order (Besides C/C++ of course). They seem to be the >best designed languages out there, without being too obscure or >immature. All three of them are ready for production. Dylan doesn't have >a lot of libraries available for it yet, but it can use C libraries, so >it's not a huge issue. Ruby can work with C as well, through SWIG, so >it's not a show stopper for Ruby either. > >Dylan currently has two compilers available, and they both generate C >code before using another compiler to produce an executable binary, so >compilation times will be really slow until the last C compilation step >is eliminated. > >One of them is called Functional Developer, or just FunDev for short, >and it's a Windows only ex-commercial product that depends on MSVC for >it's final C compilation step. FunDev will probably be open-sourced >soon. Gwydion Dylan is the open source compiler that's available, and >it'll run on anything that's *nix, as well as windows with some extra >work through Cygwin or MinGW. It depends on GCC for it's final C >compilation step. > >The #dylan channel on the freenode IRC network is quite active, but >there's only about 15 to 20 people in it at any given time, with a spike >in activity every time Dylan gets slasdotted. I first found out about >Dylan through slashdot. > >So, to sum up, I'm still digging deeper, but I suspect Dylan and Ruby >will be what I will use most, with maybe some Scheme thrown in when it's >convenient. Other languages that are interesting, but I doubt I will use >are Eiffel, Ocaml, and Modula-3. I've decided to ignore those just >because Dylan and Ruby cover the spectrum pretty well by themselves, for >production code. Scheme is the "fun" language that I can twiddle with >when I get around to it. Maybe I'll change my mind later, but that's my >thinking so far. > >Any other languages will probably have to be backwards compatible with C >or C++, as Dylan and Ruby are, before I'll give them any heed, since I'm >mostly interested in languages that are ready to work. > You should probably check out Objective C - it's used in actual production code (See the Cocoa framework from Apple). ObjC can be used as a more dynamically typed language or as a statically typed language or both so it's rather flexible in that way. It's C with some added OO functionality (I tend to like the ObjC OO philosophy better than C++'s, though I've only played with ObjC a little) and recently added exceptions. I'm not sure that anyone is using Dylan for 'work' anymore, so I'm not sure if it's 'ready to work'. Phil