Archive for Language Reviews
January 29, 2007 at 9:46 pm · Filed under C++, Tools Reviews, Language Reviews
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NOTE: there are a few posts about this tool in this blog already, but the cryptic name, cpsh, seems to have scared away some of you. Welcome back!
I have built something that is cool and useful, objectively speaking. That something is a shell - interactive or not - using C++. It does have a name, […]
January 24, 2007 at 5:47 pm · Filed under C++, Tools Reviews, Language Reviews
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Boost is a library of helping constructs for modern C++ development. What sets Boost apart from most other libraries is that it is infrastructural and horizontal in that it extends the vocabulary of the developer in any kind of problem solving, no matter what the domain.
This quite unique feature - along with the fact that […]
September 7, 2006 at 7:15 pm · Filed under Functional Programming, Tools Reviews, Language Reviews
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A few months ago I had one of those nights where you just do not feel like sleeping. That time, I created an interpreting environment for a mini Lisp in Lua. I call that LuaLisp.
DISCLAIMER to all die-hard Scheme fanatics out there: I use the term Lisp losely here, to the extent of including Scheme. [...]
September 2, 2006 at 3:26 pm · Filed under Functional Programming, Computer Science, Language Reviews
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A friend of mine has become an Erlang aficionado lately, and has - deliberately or not - pulled me into Erlang development I had not touched Erlang in a long time but always knew there was something about it that bothered me some twelve years ago. I forgot what, but now remember.
This post [...]
September 1, 2006 at 1:49 am · Filed under AJAX, Language Reviews
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Do you have to furnish a lot of HTML elements from JavaScript, such as for formatting or inserting special effects? Well, then you need to know the performance - or lack thereof - of finding and traversing DOM elements. And the performance hit of using Microsoft's browser.
This post tries to clarify the performance hits involved. [...]
August 28, 2006 at 1:01 am · Filed under C++, Tools Reviews, Language Reviews
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I woke up last night with a conviction that C++ is not a worse "scripting" language than Perl or Ruby. After a few minutes awake, I had to turn on the computer and prove this nightly conjecture. I created a draft scripting environment for C++ in a few hours.
I call my nocturnal embryo cpsh for [...]
August 26, 2006 at 6:27 pm · Filed under C++, Java, .NET, Functional Programming, IT Industry, AJAX, Language Reviews, Ruby
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If one would measure popularity by number of hits on Google, these are the five most popular computer languages:
PHP
Java
C
Flash
Perl
A graph of Google hits, using the query +lang +programming, for some of the most common languages follows. NOTE 1: please inform me if your favorite language is omitted. NOTE 2: I did not include the language [...]
August 22, 2006 at 1:21 am · Filed under .NET, Functional Programming, Language Reviews
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It is a strong current trend among languages to become more functional. No, not as "actually doing stuff" but in the mathematical sense of the word. I.e., languages more and more treat functions as any other value, and C# is no exception. Before you know it, we might have the expressivity of Lisp anno 1965 [...]
August 20, 2006 at 9:35 pm · Filed under Java, AJAX, Tools Reviews, Language Reviews, Ruby
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AJAX is a bunch of cryptic JavaScript snippets on the client side together with some advanced web services, written in another, and more powerful, language. Right? Not necessarily. I here give a brief comparison of three ways to create AJAX applications with only one language, running on both client and server.
The three unilinguistic approaches to [...]
July 6, 2006 at 5:34 pm · Filed under Functional Programming, Tools Reviews, Language Reviews
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Parsing code is hard, and strictly limited to The Chosen Few. Right? No, wrong!
I know you are aware of some compiler compilers or parser generators out there – i.e., frameworks that let you specify annotated grammar descriptions, often using a BNF (Backus Naur Form) kind of syntax. The most famous parser generator is Yacc, which [...]