Yet more programming languages

December 29, 2024

This is basically a throwaway post with brief notes on the languages I've tried since the last update.

Notes

Honestly, the IDE and integrated help are pretty good!
Have to use a LONG to get a 32-bit integer type
Despite having written many QBasic programs in the 90s, this was the first time I used QBasic FUNCTIONs

Python has a standard library function that essentially solves Project Euler problem 80

Having non-list syntax was inconvenient when I wanted to splice into a struct literal
Very impressive Clojure-like scripting language for less than 1 MB!

Nice not having to worry about whitespace
Very slow (50,000+ slower than a trivial native code solution), no random-access data structures
Hard-coded 20-second time limit on evaluation -- I ended up modifying the time limit in the minified JavaScript source file, as a work around
I like the mix of ML and C-style syntax

Seems like a lot of boilerplate, but that might be intentional
I wasn't sure how big Ada.Containers.Count_Type could be and it turns out it's implementation defined -- not what I expected!
Structure and syntax is similar to Pascal
Can only have one top-level procedure per file?

Lots of details are in the "Shen Book", but it only seems to be available in a scanned, non-OCR'd JPEG format
None of the implementations I tried seemed to include the standard library...?
Having Prolog embedded in a Lisp sounded great, but I found it awkward to use since it's lacking Prolog's standard library
I was skeptical of the lack of quote/quasiquote in a Lisp, but I didn't actually end up needing either of them!
I feel like there are some intriguing ideas in Shen, but overall I found Shen somewhat impenetrable

I liked the idea of a simple, functional, statically typed concatenative language
Switching between Forth-style syntax and C (or Python) syntax feels odd (and I don't like all the commas)
Seemed to use a lot of memory
Logical && and || have no special meaning, so short-circuiting is implemented using (explicit) anonymous functions
Fun to play with!

Dislike 0 as i32 for a signed integer type zero (but I discovered that +0 is equivalent)
Vectors return pointers, so the underlying element can change!

Number types are only 24-bit (probably normal for GPU work, but pretty small for Project Euler!)
Couldn't seem to run anything on a VM with < 8 GB of memory
Have to be very careful about data types -- there is no type-checking at all!

Easy to write code, thanks to simple and terse syntax
Couldn't get "exceptions" working -- never figured out why
Didn't have to specify any types, which was convenient
I was excited to see how fast a static, compiled solution was, but for some reason it was slower than Python
Overall, it felt a bit like Nim

Building a "hello world" program the first time took minutes and required creating multiple text files
Multiple dispatch, macros, etc. make this feel like Common Lisp, but with conventional syntax -- I'm surprised Dylan wasn't more popular, honestly!