On 12/25/2011 09:42 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
On a more general note: for "advanced application" (as the subject focuses on), and assuming that "advanced" translates to "complicated" -
Yes, you caught me. I had a hard time deciding what word to use, and settled on "advanced". To elaborate, I'm looking for a language/ system that is general-purpose in scope and supports historical through recent paradigms: procedural, structured, modular, and OO. I've done some concurrent programming and want to do more. I've toyed with functional programming; even less meta-programming. I don't need bleeding edge.
The type of applications I've been writing with Perl include system utilities, text munging, data acquisition and control, and CGI scripts. Most everything interfaces via the environment, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR, and/or files. The applications I want to build include web content management systems and web portals. I've staying away from graphical user interfaces and hope to use Web 2 technologies instead. I prefer text files over databases for interoperability and version control reasons, although I do have ideas for using SQL for indexing and query acceleration.
Other wish-list features include FOSS, rigorous language/ library design and documentation, a comprehensive and easily extended library, support for automated testing, robust interoperability with OS, local resources, and remote services, and deep integration with the FOSS ecosystem. Built-in mini-languages for regular expressions, documentation, formatting/ templating, SQL, etc., are a conundrum; libraries would suit me fine.
there's a lot to be said for application-specific languages - otherwise there's way to much cognitive pain involved in translating to/from problem domain to/from low-level constructs a la c, java, ..... --- e.g., for mathematical manipulation, give me MATLAB or MACSYMA over c, any day of the week
Agreed. (The language/ system I'm seeking should be capable of implementing application-specific languages.)
David