Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Thu, 19 Jun 2003
Compositional semantics
James is recounting the continuation of his conversation with Ken Arnold about Ant:
[12:32] |
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The problem with Ant is that it violates something we learned with Unix. Tasks aren't composable.Compositional semantics are very important. They lead to simple and regular languages for accomplishing tasks (and yes, Ant is a language). One of the things that irks/trips me up in Python is that not everything is an expression. This leads to situations where composability is compromised.
Java eats, then barfs Smalltalk's lunch
This ought to make Markus even happier ;-).
From Andy Bower, as related by James Robertson:
[12:20] |
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So, yes, in our case Java did eat Smalltalk's lunch. The really irritating thing is it couldn't keep it down and ended up barfing it all over the sidewalk.Same thing happened to Dylan and a number of other promising dynamic language designs...
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