A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
Yes!
UK trade union law breaches workers' human rights as it does not protect them from sanctions short of dismissal for taking part in industrial action, the Supreme Court ruled today.
"The right of an employer to impose any sanction at all short of dismissal for participation in lawful industrial action nullifies the right to take lawful strike action," Judge Ingrid Simler said in the court's written ruling. #TradeUnions#Unison#WorkersRights#HumanRights#ECHR#UK
while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.
i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.
some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.
best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.
i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎
Unison is an interesting project and I like to see their development going well. I often find some cool ideas in it, which we will borrow and re-implement in our #lisp world someday :)
@daviwil@PaniczGodek but in all fairness, I think interest in Scheme has been growing due to #Unison's adoption of Chez for their primary backend and 470x performance increase they saw as an immediate result.
The average person seems to think that scheme is a slow toy language for learning how to implement programming languages, which is just incredibly wrong as demonstrated by projects like #idris, #guix, #goblins and countless others. #scheme is C among functional languages.
To be fair, I think Haskell will continue to fill the niche it filled ~10 years ago, around the time it started to get mainstream hype. Small teams of skilled devs delivering robust products that would normally require much larger teams to maintain will continue to prevail. Purely functional lazy programming was never bound for world domination in an economy which is antagnostic to curiosity, creativity and truths.
On the other hand, I have the feeling that we're going to see more and more Haskellers-turned-Rustaceans come to realize that #Rust does little to alleviate the primary barrier to Haskell's wider success -- fast and predictable turnaround time for projects developing cutting-edge technologies -- and will wind up going the same route as some major Haskell projects such as #Unison and #Idris have in recent years, which is to try #Chez Scheme, only to discover that it allows them to release blazing fast functional programs on a generic foundation where major breaking changes are practically non-existent, providing incredible flexibility while significantly reducing dependencies by dint of the ad-hoc tooling that falls out of the bottom of #scheme. Not to mention the joys that come from near-instant startup times, some of the fastest compile time you've ever encountered, fully-customizable interactive development and a surgical #debugger that rivals Haskell in scheer fun. Yesterdays naysayers will become tomorrow's enthusiastic bootstrappers. Or a at least a boy can dream.
That said, in all seriousness I don't think Scheme will ever reach the heights of Haskell's moderate commercial success. But I do think that projects built on Scheme, like Unison, will get a leg up and eventually surpass it, and interest in #lisp will only grow.