On 29/10/2010 21:30, retard wrote:
Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:54:03 +0100, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
On 14/10/2010 13:30, Justin Johansson wrote:
Touted often around here is the term "systems language".
May we please discuss a definition to be agreed upon for the usage this
term (at least in this community) and also have some agreed upon
examples of PLs that might also be members of the "set of systems
languages". Given a general subjective term like this, one would have
to suspect that the D PL is not the only member of this set.
Cheers
Justin Johansson
PS. my apologies for posting a lame joke recently; certainly it was not
meant to be disparaging towards the D PL and hopefully it was not taken
this way.
It's those programming languages whose type systems can be used to move
and navigate across water (but can sink if you rock it enough).
It's probably very hard to find an accurate definition for this kind of
term. The same can be said about terms such as 'functional language'. Many
'pragmatic' software engineering terms are based on emotions, broken
mental models, inaccurate or purposefully wrong information. In my
opinion these are all subtypes of a thing called 'marketing bullshit'.
Compare
to other languages whose type systems merely floats on water, but don't
move anywhere... (although some guarantee they will never sink no matter
how much you rock it!)
You can easily create a language with guarantees about safety: no
segfaults, no index out of bounds errors, no overflows etc. Some of these
languages even guarantee termination. However, they're not Turing
complete in that case, which reduces their usefulness. Another thing is,
these guarantees can be expensive. However, the trend has been towards
higher level languages. One reason is Moore's law, you have achieved the
same results with a N times slower implementation using the N times
faster hardware.
Why this serious reply? Perhaps I fell victim to an overly accurate
analogy, but my previous post was a joke/satire.
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
