Matthew Huntbach takes a long hard look at the coolest language on the planet and is distinctly under impressed by what he sees…
Friday 16 March 2007
by Matthew Huntbach
Tim Sweeney’s talk The Next Mainstream Programming Language (PowerPoint PPT) is in many ways an antidote to the recent Ruby hype. Tim calls for the use of stronger types to ensure program reliability. He praises the academically-developed Haskell functional programming language. He raises concurrency as a feature which must be tackled in the next big programming language, using a better model than the shared state with threads and mutual exclusion devices used by Java - and by Ruby - (...)
I, too, have recently come by Ruby and you’ve echoed many of my own sentiments regarding the language. There’s not a lot to recommend it beyond Rails, which I’ve had a good time with.
As an undergrad studying CS, I was first exposed to Prolog in a computational linguistics class — my classmates were primarily linguistics/philosophy students, with a few of us CS blokes in the mix. The CS folks had more trouble with it than the others, which wasn’t at all surprising to me knowing the kind of folks in the CS program. Once I grokked Prolog, I fell in love with it. Heady stuff.
