From: Nicholas Van Weerdenburg Date: 2004-06-11T12:00:04+09:00 Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Unit tests ... not just for the young Thanks for the indepth reply. Ocaml also seems to have an interesting buzz, and does well on programming contests. It looked sortof weird to me. The other language I hear of a lot is Haskell. Modula-3 I have know very little about, and see little mention of. So, for now it's Ruby, Emacs Lisp, Scheme, Python for me, in that order. I'll defintely spend a few hours checking out Dylan and seeing if it bumps the mix. I agree with you Scheme assessment- I have no real reason to learn it, but it's just cool, different, and fun. Nick 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. > > 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. > > > > Nicholas Van Weerdenburg wrote: > >> No I haven't. Eiffel and Dylan are two other languages I've noted >> floating in the zeitgeist as worth exploring. I'm mainly focusing on >> Ruby and Emacs Lisp at the moment. I tried Smalltalk via Squeak, but >> found Squeak very bizarre, so I moved onto lisp/scheme for amusement >> for now. Actually, Ruby blocks as an example of >> higher-order-functions led me through about six hours of reading >> ruby-python discussions, which led me to lisp comparisions, which >> lead to scheme, etc. Hyperlinks are evil :). That said, Ruby does >> seem to be a truly inspired melding all the different language >> capabilities. >> >> Has Dylan ever been used for production software? >> >> Nick >> > > ...( rest of replieds removed)