On 6/6/2011 12:18 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
Below:)
On Jun 5, 2011, at 11:19 PM, "C. Scott Ananian"<[email protected]> wrote:
I explored this idea a bit once upon a time in the context of Java:
http://cscott.net/Publications/design.pdf
The bibliography cites most of the related work I know about.
--scott
Reading it now -- thanks for sharing this.
I remember feeling so fascinated when I heard people talking about JavaOS on a chip; while I was
aware of people jamming whole operating systems into ROM, the idea of an OS written mostly in a
high level language by itself was completely new to me then (I was in highschool, I had only just
secured Internet access for the first time) and it was just so compelling... "You can do
that??" was what I remember thinking, "wait, how's that work... Oh I don't even care,
forget about this manual memory management thing then! May I have a triple tall mocha with no whip?
And do you do those in bulk orders?"
oh yeah...
I remember something about this (I was either in middle or highschool at
the time, I forget...).
however, at the time, my motivation was mostly killed by me trying to
use the language:
oh... grr... using this language sucks... mostly I remember it being an
issue about it being very painful to use, and also *absurdly* slow vs
what I could do in C...
so, I stuck with C, which was the main language I was using at the time.
I think I remember originally hearing about Java when I was still in
elementary school (long ago... back in the 90s...).
It's a shame that it took me so many years to find Smalltalk.
Sometimes I wish I could go back in time just to point myself at things. I may
not have listened to future-me then, though, so I suppose the real lesson is to
remember that I probably don't know anything of import even now, and that the
best ideas I've got presently are likely to find hard judgement in my own
eventual hindsight.
most of my life has been me trying alternatives to C, and just being
eventually like "oh well, whatever..." and sticking with C.
the most serious I ever really got with developing in non-C language was
with Scheme.
eventually, I ended up rather burned with Scheme, as I eventually had to
migrate back to plain C (the VM became unmaintainable), and ended up
"losing" most of what code was written in or revolved around Scheme, and
for a good while (a good number of years), I was determined to try to
avoid recreating the situation which caused this (sadly... I am back to
the situation once again, with a large highly-tooled codebase, with a
lot of VM-related machinery in a fairly central role in the codebase, ...).
I also have my own language (BGBScript) which is mostly in the
JavaScript/ActionScript family, but it is mostly used for a few tasks:
evaluating dynamically-entered expressions (entered at the console,
similar to a REPL / "Read Eval Print Loop");
for "triggered eval" in a 3D engine (a map event triggers evaluating an
expression string);
high-level scripts (thus far, mostly only a few things involving
3D-rendered cutscenes and similar);
...
however, I may consider using it for more "serious" activities in the
future, if it is sufficiently "proven" (my current worries are mostly
bugs/poor-performance/heap-gargbage/...).
also a lesser worry of ending up with a lot of code in a language that
for some reason I might end up having to drop or replace later.
or such...
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