[wellylug] Non-standard languages on Linux

[Arnim Littek]

On Wed, 11 May 2005 23:11:18 +1200 (NZST) David Antliff <dave.antliff at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> Of course, with careful data structures and the right choice of libraries, 
> C can do all of this, including repairing the ozone layer. It's just a bit 
> messier without the language support.

That's just the key.  The "messier" is the problem.  (Given time) I could do anything in assembler that one can do in any high level language, but the masses of code it takes to do so is no longer readily understandable, whereas fewer, clearer lines in Python can be really easy to understand/maintain.  

What's the big cost in big software?  Maintenance...  IMHO Python is a huge win in clarity, replacing a lot of syntactic sugar from the likes of C/C++ with stuff a lot closer to the algorithm you actually want to implement.  I particularly like Python for numerics, where it looks to me like the libraries now maturing make it more powerful than Matlab (numarray/Scipy/matplotlib etc), but for others a big win is its inherent cross-platform nature.  

> Just out of interest, does anyone use ADA or OCAML? 

For a lovely application of OCAML, see www.confluent.org.  Tom Hawkins gets it.

And while I'm on the HDL front, GHDL (www.ghdl.org) is written in Ada, which isn't surprising given what it does.  

Arnim.