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Discussion on: Language Features: Best and Worst

 
awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

In grad school I programmed in C/C++ for 5 years, now I'm mostly Java and R, but I'm teaching myself Haskell, as well. I work on Windows, Ubuntu, and macOS. If you're asking which compiler I use to compile my own code, just gcc or whatever's available. I haven't yet looked into anything for my language project.

I found this article while researching this and it mentions yacc, which I have heard of. I wasn't aware that bison is its successor. I don't know how yacc works, though, I just recognise the name.

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isaacrstor profile image
Isaac Yonemoto

Before you move forward with your project I strongly suggest you study Julia (as a replacement for R) and Elixir (as a replacement for Java). They're more modern languages so they've worked through a lot of issues in their recent, early pre 1.0 phases and have thought, hard and heatedly, about a lot of things you're looking at. Both are functional, and both are dynamic (I think strict adherence to staticity is a bit of a religion: Julia kills the idea that static = performance, because of its amazing compiler strategy, and Elixir + dialyzer kills the idea that static = correctness - I basically have no runtime errors with static typechecking engine, and the rock solid dynamic stability of OTP makes it way worth it - I'm a a relatively inexperienced dev, they just promoted me from junior directly to senior =) with a lot of freedom and in elixir I wrote a testing harness in three days for a senior coworker's go program (6 months in the making) that triggered both linux and go program panics/errors, while my harness (living on the same node and dispatching and monitoring tens of thousands of concurrent processes) was fine.

Moreover, both PLs focus on developer productivity and joy. I don't know if that's what you're optimizing for, but I suggest learning from some of the best!

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Thanks, Isaac! I'll have to explore a few more languages before I make a decision one way or the other. I'll definitely check out Julia and Elixir.