Friday, November 03, 2006

Programming languages

If you want a programming language implementation, you have to pick two out of three features:
  • Good performance
  • Expressive language
  • Popular

I know which two I care about. Assembly only satisfies the first one, Common Lisp satisfies the first two, Java satisfies the first and last, and of course Ruby has the last two but its performance sucks. No language I'm aware of has all three at this stage of human history.

2 comments:

Slava Pestov said...

Python is far too slow, not only compared to C and C++ but dynamically typed languages such as Common Lisp.

Hobel said...

What if Java (or Scala?) had a more convenient syntax (i.e. exp based, not statement based)?

Or similarly, if SML was more powerful, with easier syntax and easier destructive operations?

I think it'd be fast, expressive and cool.

With Lisp syntax it would be even better, but not as popular :D