Re: [lmi] Languages with first-class arrays

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2021 00:36:12 +0000 Greg Chicares <gchicares@sbcglobal.net> 
wrote:

GC> On 3/24/21 10:06 PM, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
GC> > [this is completely OT, please feel free to skip it if you're busy]
GC> 
GC> 'O' can be taken as "On" rather than "Off". I just had my second
GC> shot of Pfizer vaccine, and the only side effect so far is worrying
GC> about side effects, but that worry is a severe side effect that can
GC> only be mitigated by an interesting diversion.

 Thanks to my rich statistics based on whole 2 (and not one, as some
inferior statistics would be) cases, your worries are completely unfounded
and you will suffer nothing worse than some mild pain at the injection
site.

 But I don't need an excuse to launch into a discussion of programming
languages, anyhow...


GC> But if Raku doesn't have such a speed penalty

 Unfortunately it does. In the interest of objectivity, one of the main
problems with using Raku is that it's pretty slow. It's not impossibly
slow, and there are definitely languages slower than it, but it's slower
than anything comparable to it that I would consider using, e.g. Perl or
Python. And it is, of course, nowhere near C++ or Rust level.

 Its performance is already much better than it used to be and there are
reasonable grounds to expect it to significantly improve even more in the
near future, with some important changes coming soon to its implementation,
but I'm still not sure if it will be fast enough for many types of tasks
I'd like to use it for. I'm afraid the language is just too rich and
flexible to also be very efficient.


GC> >  Sorry for my exuberance, but this is a part of Raku that I really like
GC> > (spoiler: there are other parts that I like even more!).
GC> 
GC> You really ought to take a look at APL.

 The old that is strong does not wither, so being old is not necessarily
disqualifying, but is APL actually still used anywhere? I believe some of
its ideas survive in MATLAB, but that's the closest I've ever come into
contact with it.

 I'm also not sure if APL really ever was a general programming language.
Raku has all these nice features, but it also has excellent support for
many common programming tasks and all text processing proficiency you'd
expect from a language of Perl family. E.g. I don't think I would have
wanted to write https://github.com/vadz/gcc-warnings-tools using APL, but
doing it in Raku was pretty fast and _almost_ painless and I'll definitely
consider using it again if I have some small tool to write -- which is
probably not something I would have thought about APL, even if I knew it.


 Good luck with your continued lack of side effects!
VZ

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