Friday 12 February 2016

So right then what next?

Right then what next? Do I look at Elm and start doing things in a browser? Nothing I do in my day job goes anywhere near the web. But if your next language does not make you think differently then why bother? What about Elixir? That is back in the days of Erlang. If you want types in Erlang then there is a separate tool that does this for you. But surely that's not the same thing as having proper types in your language. I am sold on the idea that you need a static type system. Also I am sold on the idea that the either and maybe types are the billion pound solution to the billion pound mistake. Why would anybody not want static types? Why would anybody not want pattern matching? You can or I should say you must use Dialyzer. Who thought of that name? I can't read the word without a mental image of pipes pumping blood around. Aaarg. Elixir looks like it has lots of good ideas. And you get all the concurrency capability of Erlang. But I like the lisp way of writing, where you have one opening bracket at the start of the idea and a close bracket at the end of the idea. What is the problem? Why would you not want that? If it's not there in the code then you have to think where each part starts and stops. You either write the brackets or you have to imagine them all the time. And it lets you have hyphens in object names which is the sanest way to write multi-part identifiers. You can use hyphens in Cobol too. Using underlines is ugly and using capitals midway through the word is not much better and gets much worse if the identifier starts with a lower case letter. That is an idea worthy of the camel that they say invented it. In Basic on the Sinclair Spectrum you could have spaces in identifiers - beat that. Do I say now this is the time to do the deep dive into Haskell that I have been postponing all along? In honesty are all other languages just attempts to postpone the day you have to learn Haskell? So far with all this stuff I have just been moving across the face of the waters. Hmm. And I've got Smalltalk loaded on a machine somewhere. And there's Scala. Scala looks suspiciously enterprise to me. But it's supposed to be scalable so maybe there's a lighter side to it. I note there is a book specifically about functional programming with Scala. So here we are floating above the JVM again. Java is another one I've not touched, though there's no reason to go there now that I can think of. When I looked at the idea of embedding a high(er) level language in bingo equipment I thought Forth would be ideal. Only Scheme comes close. In fact I still think Forth would be ideal. How much does a clarinet cost, and how long would it take to get reasonably good at it? There again there's Clojurescript now for your browser which ties in directly with Clojure which I quite liked. They're are doing all kinds of clever stuff. When you have to call your solution Om you know enlightenment is near. Either that or madness. So right then what next?