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Didier Verna's scientific blog: Lisp, Emacs, LaTeX and random stuff.

Tuesday, January 31 2012

JSPP: Morphing C++ into JavaScript

I'm happy to announce the publication of a new technical report entitled JSPP: Morphing C++ into JavaScript. The abstract is given below.

In a time where the differences between static and dynamic languages are starting to fade away, this report brings one more element to the "convergence" picture by showing that thanks to the novelties from its recent 0x standard, it is relatively easy to implement a JavaScript layer on top of C++. By that, we not only mean to implement the language features, but also to preserve as much of its original notation as possible. In doing so, we provide the programmer with a means to freely incorporate highly dynamic JavaScript-like code into a regular C++ program.

Thursday, June 24 2010

Dynamic typing 30 years later

When the C++ guys announced support for lambda expressions in the upcoming version of the standard (assuming there's one), I refrained from blogging on the "better 30 years late than never" melody.

Now I got big news for you guys. Today, everybody likes dynamic types. They even dare saying so at ECOOP (which means that ECOOP now accepts those papers, yeah things change).

This year, we had a short introduction to an empirical study about the positive (or at least not negative -- one step at a time, this is still ECOOP --) impact of dynamic typing on the development process. And, cherry on the cake, we had this Microsoft guy who presented a paper about... supporting dynamic types in C# !!

In short, the guy said that he wants to be as fashionable and cool as the people doing all sorts of fancy stuff with their scripting languages (he also said that this was a demand from the C# community).

So that's it. A couple years ago, people suddenly realized that functional programming and, in particular, lambda expressions were a good thing. Today, people are also starting to realize that dynamic typing is a good thing.

So after having endured 30 years of sarcasm about our dynamic types, it's only fair that we, the dynamic languages community, get to be sarcastic now.

Wednesday, April 15 2009

Concepts of Programming Languages

These days, I'm reading "Concepts of Programming languages", 8th edition, by Robert W. Sebesta (Addison Wesley). In the category of programming languages comparison books, this is all in all a fair one, especially after having read the crappy "Comparative Programming Languages", 3rd edition, by Clark (Addison Wesley).

As in all those similar books, the room for Lisp is obviously miserable, but that is not very surprising. At least Sebesta seems to know something about it... but wait ! That was until yesterday.

Yesterday, I read chapter 12 (Support for Object Oriented Programming), and this reading pretty much ruined my fun, my evening, and the little consideration I had for the author. On page 508 you can find this:

CLOS, an object-oriented version of Lisp, also supports functional programming.


And there's even a reference to the CLOS specification reference document.

Since the book is suddenly turning the Big Circus way, let's not stop just here. A couple of pages later, there's an interview of Bjarne Stroustrup, for whom having invented C++ is obviously not enough, and so claims that

Currently, C++ is the best language for multi-paradigm programming.



That's it boys. These guys have no clue whatsoever.
:-(
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Copyright (C) 2008 -- 2018 Didier Verna didier@lrde.epita.fr