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2 points by garnet7 5223 days ago | link | parent

I'd probably look for something very different from Arc -- something at least partly complementary. However, I don't know what that would be. What language would at least somewhat complement Arc but not be a low-level language like C?

I wouldn't recommend Ruby because I was not happy with the state of their docs and it didn't seem different enough from Perl or Python to warrant a major effort.

I wouldn't recommend Perl, because Perl is mostly for getting stuff done. If you want to get things done, use Perl, but if you want to learn a language for the intellectual gratification of learning something new, Perl might not be the best for that.

Java is mostly a verbose Python, so I wouldn't recommend that either.

Python works well enough. Not terribly interesting, imo.

Erlang seems pretty heavily focused on concurrency, so unless you need that I probably wouldn't specifically recommend Erlang.

I've heard Lua is simple and tiny. That might be interesting.

Haskell looks difficult. :)

Smalltalk might complement Arc nicely. Maybe Smalltalk.



2 points by thaddeus 5223 days ago | link

I've started haskell. I chose haskell because it appears there is a good balance between performance/documentation/libraries. I already know one language that can be slow, so I think learning a language that's blazing fast will balance the mix. And although Python/Ruby have better docs/libraries - they are much slower than even scheme/arc. Erlang docs are horrific. IMHO.

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1 point by rocketnia 5222 days ago | link

You came to pretty much the same conclusions I did. I'll probably try out Haskell too. It fits nicely with the kind of side-effect-free-even-to-the-point-of-monads-and-arrows programming I try to do in other languages anyway, and the main thing keeping me away from it has been a perception that it had a really slow implementation.

What I had ended up voting for in the poll though was Clojure. I figure it's lenient about types, it's very reliably cross-platform ('cause of all the business interest in maintaining Java), it has better documentation than Erlang, it can still communicate with C and Erlang (as pretty much any language can, apparently), and beyond that, it has a language-level focus on communicating with other JVM code, which should give you good access to lots of other well-worked-on codebases. As far as I can tell, once you've got access to C and JVM libraries, Python libraries are the next gold mine, but I don't know how to access those libraries except through Python somehow (like through system calls or something), so it didn't affect my decision. (Incidentally, for many of the same reasons I recommend Clojure, I'm hooked on Groovy, but I did consciously try not to let my own criteria make a difference.)

In any case, yeah, now that I see it as fast, Haskell looks great. :-p

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1 point by thaddeus 5222 days ago | link

I wonder if it's possible to build the beautiful arc syntax as a layer upon haskell. Probably not doable ~ macro's/expansion and all, but still - would be awesome.

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1 point by rocketnia 5221 days ago | link

Liskell sounds very close to what you're thinking about. Also, the "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" Haskell tutorial might interest you. I think this is a pretty popular train of thought. ^_^

That's actually where I'm starting with Haskell. It turns out Haskell is a much more natural home for Blade (my pet lisplike) than any of the other languages I've tried: JavaScript, Groovy, Arc, and Blade itself (with an intent to port/bootstrap it). It's almost scary!

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2 points by lg 5219 days ago | link

ruby is slower than arc? i'm curious what your benchmarks were...

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3 points by thaddeus 5219 days ago | link

Assuming arc is marginally slower than PLT scheme:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-languages-are-fa...

  Scheme PLT	         1.14	1.14	7.65	13.61	20.05	38.65	62.92
  Smalltalk VisualWorks	13.79	13.79	17.46	19.56	27.98	43.78	65.61
  Lua	                 1.39	2.00	16.02	22.85	25.37	39.39	47.59
  Ruby JRuby	        11.30	11.30	16.85	28.99	70.01	149.76	199.57
  PHP	                 2.00	2.00	9.11	58.75	90.47	105.12	105.12
  Python CPython	 1.93	1.93	12.76	62.45	69.75	110.98	110.98
  Perl               	 2.01	2.01	7.28	67.28	107.69	192.28	192.28
  Ruby MRI	         7.44	7.44	28.42	91.00	195.87	447.05	535.97

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