What New Language After Ruby?

ruby-talk
1

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
Ruby. The intention is to gather information on what other good new
languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully the
language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in some specific
areas, or just simply has totally different approach; hopefully also we
will not have to consider Lisp-like programming languages).

Regards,

Bill

2

I don’t know Lisp myself, but based on comments by those who are proficient,
it should definitely be on the list.

···

On Wednesday 21 August 2002 09:52 am, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
Ruby. The intention is to gather information on what other good new
languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully the
language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in some specific
areas, or just simply has totally different approach; hopefully also we
will not have to consider Lisp-like programming languages).

Regards,

Bill

3

At the pragmatic programmer web site, there is a LoTY project running,
this year’s language is Haskell … I’m a year behind though and am
working on Ruby this year. :wink:

-pate

···

On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

4

Hi Bill,

learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?
check out that link:
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/loty/

Have fun experimenting with new languages,
A

···

Armin Roehrl, http://www.approximity.com

Rubybuch: Mitom Tv Bóng Đá Trực Tiếp - Kênh Ttbđ Mitomtv Không Giật Lag-Full Hd Blv

Agile Entwicklerkonferenz: 22. und 23.10 in Nürnberg.

5

Although activity seems to have died down, here are some links

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/loty/

and the Yahoo Group

and the Loty Wiki

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/cgi-local/pragprog?LanguageOfTheYear

By the way, I’ve found Haskell very challenging. It is a paradigm shift, and
those are always hard. However, overcoming those challenges has been a very
worthwhile experience, and I feel that it has improved my coding, especially
from a design perspective.

Cheers,
Wilkes

···

— William Djaja Tjokroaminata billtj@z.glue.umd.edu wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
Ruby. The intention is to gather information on what other good new
languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully the
language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in some specific
areas, or just simply has totally different approach; hopefully also we
will not have to consider Lisp-like programming languages).

Regards,

Bill

Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs
http://www.hotjobs.com

6

I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
Ruby. The intention is to gather information on what other good new
languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully the
language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in some specific
areas, or just simply has totally different approach; hopefully also we
will not have to consider Lisp-like programming languages).

Well, what about ocaml?
It is a functional language. Quite different approach.
It runs under unix and windows. You can build standalone executables. It
is strongly typed ML-like language. Has bindings to gtk and opengl, and
it has a speed and memory comparable to C/C++.

Another bet is mercury: a typed prolog variant.

Gergo

±[Kontra, Gergely @ Budapest University of Technology and Economics]-+

    Email: kgergely@mcl.hu,  kgergely@turul.eet.bme.hu          |

URL: turul.eet.bme.hu/~kgergely Mobile: (+36 20) 356 9656 |
±------“Olyan langesz vagyok, hogy poroltoval kellene jarnom!”-------+
.
Magyar php mirror es magyar php dokumentacio: http://hu.php.net

7

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

Haskell: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/loty/

8

Hi,

···

In message “What New Language After Ruby?” on 02/08/21, William Djaja Tjokroaminata billtj@z.glue.umd.edu writes:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

I remember Dave once said his language for the year 2001 was Japanese.
I’m not sure if he succeeded learning the language. I will check him
when I meet with him at the RubyConf 2002. :wink:

And the language for the year 2002 is … tata … Haskell.

						matz.
9

William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

I’ll assing you Poplog. This will require you to learn POP-11, Prolog
and Common Lisp. I’ll give you 5 years for that, but as a final exam
you’ll have to write a complete, modular editor, as powerful as
Emacs, based on POP-11 but with full Poplog capabilities (thus
allowing use of Emacs-Lisp code). You may use VED (Poplog native
editor) as a base, and you’ll have to implement a VIM emulation layer
on The Beast.

Sounds like good homework? :smiley:

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

10

William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
Ruby. The intention is to gather information on what other good new
languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully the
language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in some specific
areas, or just simply has totally different approach; hopefully also we
will not have to consider Lisp-like programming languages).

Regards,

Bill

I have learnt OCAML some month ago and it seems to be a really nice language,
a very good complement to C/C++ and Ruby. It is fast (compilable to native
code,which is slower than optimized but faster than nonoptmized C code),
automatically garbage collected and it suits very well for logically
nontrivial problems. It supports object oriented programming, but
I did not find this feature really compelling. Using it for functional
style programms is a lot of fun.

I can recommend it to everybody.

Regards, Christian

11

Folks have already thrown Lisp, OCaml, Prolog, and Japanese into the
mix, and Smalltalk is always floating around. Given that those are
reasonably academic languages (Okay, except for Japanese :slight_smile: I’ll add
a few of the more low-level or odd languages.

Forth: Backwards Think You Will! But it’s also a good way to get your
brain around Postscript. And it’s a very different way of thinking
about things.

Assembly Language: Doesn’t matter whose, though a good old-fashioned
CISC assembly, like, for example, VAX or Motorola 68000, is the most
satisfying. Oddly powerful and hobbled assemblies like IBM’s OS/390
are good too.

Fortran: Yeah, it’s older than you are, but it still can’t be beat for speed.

APL: Matrix math, baby, yeah! While it’s nearly as unreadable as,
say, Befunge, it can’t be beat for compact math power.

COBOL: None of this wacky (and really twisted) object-oriented COBOL,
but the original. While COBOL is the whipping-boy of the computer
industry, I’d much much rather find out that the code running my
bank or calculating my paycheck was written in COBOL than in Java or
(god forbid) C.

INTERCAL: Because it’s always a good idea to know a programming
language that you can vow to never, ever, program in. Ever.

···

At 11:52 PM +0900 8/21/02, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

–
Dan

--------------------------------------“it’s like this”-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk

12

What’s wrong with Lisp, or functional programming in general? I’ve done
some work in functional languages such as OCaml and Scheme and can say
it’s a very powerful idea for certain problems, far better than Java or
Ruby in many respects for certain problems, such as for doing AI work
and compiler construction.

···

On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 11:52:30PM +0900, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

(hopefully the language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in
some specific areas, or just simply has totally different approach;
hopefully also we will not have to consider Lisp-like programming
languages).

–
Rafael R. Sevilla +63(2)8123151
Software Developer, Imperium Technology Inc. +63(917)4458925

13

Hi,

For fun you could try Squeak:

For usefulness with Ruby, try C first and then C++ with QT:

http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/index.html

Regards,

Jostein

···

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is
to learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year
2001 it was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any
language candidate for this year?

I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
Ruby. The intention is to gather information on what other good new
languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully
the language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in some
specific areas, or just simply has totally different approach;
hopefully also we will not have to consider Lisp-like programming
languages).

Regards,

Bill

14

Something I’ve found to be incredibly enlightening is trying to write my
own language. It helps you learn why certain languages have certain
syntax, helps you understand language memory managements (like Ruby’s
GC), and so on. Plus it lets you experimental with a language that
suite’s your taste.

Hell, be daring, and write your own language in a new language (i.e., if
you’ve never touched TCL, write an OO-language interpreter with fun
syntax in TCL). Granted, that might burn you right out. ^,^

···

On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 10:52, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a discussion on defending
Ruby. The intention is to gather information on what other good new
languages out there are worthy to learn, after we know Ruby (hopefully the
language can be considered to be “better” than Ruby in some specific
areas, or just simply has totally different approach; hopefully also we
will not have to consider Lisp-like programming languages).

Regards,

Bill

15

My first reaction to the LoTY project was, man you guys
got a lot of free time. :slight_smile:

I think LoTY is a good idea, but a bit idealistic for me
unless I plan on using the language. I looked at Haskell,
and decided I don’t have a use for it. However, I think
that ocaml or squeak may be something that I could use.

Ocaml because it is compilable and fast. Squeak because
of the language and the development environment.

$0.02

···

On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 12:04:35AM +0900, Pat Eyler wrote:

On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

To Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

I think in the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, one of the advices is to
learn a new language at least once a year. Probably for the year 2001 it
was Ruby. Now we are already in August 2002. Is there any language
candidate for this year?

At the pragmatic programmer web site, there is a LoTY project running,
this year’s language is Haskell … I’m a year behind though and am
working on Ruby this year. :wink:

–
Jim Freeze
If only I had something clever to say for my comment…
~

16

Thanks for the pointers. Uh oh, this year’s language is Haskell. I am
sorry for broadening the question. For people who have used Ruby and have
understood Haskell, is Haskell really practical (i.e., we can use it in
our daily professional work), or is it more interesting as just a mind
exercise? In particular, is it possible to combine Haskell and C (and
therefore Ruby, C, and Haskell)?

Someone pointed me to Lua before, and he has combined Ruby, C, and
Lua. Has Lua been considered before? Or Lua is just too simple?

Regards,

Bill

···

========================================================================
Pat Eyler pate@red-bean.com wrote:

At the pragmatic programmer web site, there is a LoTY project running,
this year’s language is Haskell … I’m a year behind though and am
working on Ruby this year. :wink:

-pate

17

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your opinion. However, do you think learning Haskell
is really something that we can justify to our supervisors, or is it
something that we should learn during our own free time? Can you really
put Haskell into a production code?

Based on other responses, there are several Lisp-like
(functional) languages such as Ocaml, Mercury, ML, Scheme, and
Haskell. Since I cannot find the discussion in the Loty web site, does
anybody know why Haskell is chosen among the various functional languages?

To me several factors influence the “usefulness” of a language:
- how long the language has been around (related to bug fixes)
- number of users (related to getting help)
- can be interfaced to C/C++ or Java (related to production code)
- amount of library (related to practicality)
- execution and memory performance (related to why we should drop C)
- easy, clean, short, and regular syntax (related to our time :slight_smile: )

Does Haskell satisfy any or a lot of these criteria? (To me, Ruby
satisfies all of them, except the execution and memory performance, which
is then solved by writing the C extension.)

Regards,

Bill

···

============================================================================
Wilkes Joiner boognish23@yahoo.com wrote:

By the way, I’ve found Haskell very challenging. It is a paradigm shift, and
those are always hard. However, overcoming those challenges has been a very
worthwhile experience, and I feel that it has improved my coding, especially
from a design perspective.

Cheers,
Wilkes

18

Hi Matz,

I think it is really true that the language after Ruby should really be
Japanese :slight_smile: I tried to find a Ruby library to do Fast Fourier Transform
(FFT), and the only one that I could found has the explanation in
Japanese… :slight_smile:

Regards,

Bill

···

=======================================================================
Yukihiro Matsumoto matz@ruby-lang.org wrote:

I remember Dave once said his language for the year 2001 was Japanese.
I’m not sure if he succeeded learning the language. I will check him
when I meet with him at the RubyConf 2002. :wink:

And the language for the year 2002 is … tata … Haskell.

  					matz.
19

No problem, Giuseppe, as long as you can assure me that result of doing
this is the ultimate programming language to end all the other languages
:slight_smile: I will take the 5 years instead of the full-lifetime learning job :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Bill

···

==========================================================================
Giuseppe Bilotta bilotta78@hotpop.com wrote:

I’ll assing you Poplog. This will require you to learn POP-11, Prolog
and Common Lisp. I’ll give you 5 years for that, but as a final exam
you’ll have to write a complete, modular editor, as powerful as
Emacs, based on POP-11 but with full Poplog capabilities (thus
allowing use of Emacs-Lisp code). You may use VED (Poplog native
editor) as a base, and you’ll have to implement a VIM emulation layer
on The Beast.

Sounds like good homework? :smiley:

20

I had Robin Popplestone, the creator of POP-1, for my “programming
paradigms” class. While we didn’t actually use POP-11, we did have to
use poplog/VED since the Scheme implementation was “UMass scheme”,
written by Popplestone (as I recall), in poplog with VED as the
development environment/interpreter. I also took the honors section
where we did prolog and ML using, once again, the poplog environment.
That was an experience. Though it seems to me I may have used SML for
most of my actual work, just making sure the code ran in ved.

I have to say, poplog taken as a whole is already pretty emacs-like,
short of not implementing emacs lisp. It already has common lisp and
CLOS built in I think, which is probably better anyways. He
had built an entire automated grading system for the class into it, plus
a whole bunch of other things. I recall towards the end of the semester
he was working on building some native widgets for VED so it wouldn’t
have to use motif. Interesting class, interesting professor. Too bad
that he’s retired now.

Anyways, sorry for rambling - you just brought back memories.

-kyle

···

On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 01:52:41AM +0900, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

I’ll assing you Poplog. This will require you to learn POP-11, Prolog
and Common Lisp. I’ll give you 5 years for that, but as a final exam
you’ll have to write a complete, modular editor, as powerful as
Emacs, based on POP-11 but with full Poplog capabilities (thus
allowing use of Emacs-Lisp code). You may use VED (Poplog native
editor) as a base, and you’ll have to implement a VIM emulation layer
on The Beast.

Sounds like good homework? :smiley:

–
moved

The policeman isn’t there to create disorder;
the policeman is there to preserve disorder.