Re: in defense of GC

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On Thu, 2007-02-08 at 10:24 +0100, Markus E Leypold wrote:
> Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@arcor.de> writes:
> 

> > How will a piece of source code, your own or someone else's, and
> > a language with tools fit these and the market as we might think
> > it is now?
> 
> It will depend on the ability of mine or someone else to code in this
> unnamed language with arbitrary tools. Note that I doubt that "we
> think" the same about the market and what counts -- finally -- is how
> the market is, not how we think about it, which might be a different
> thing altogether.
> 
> Does that answer satisfy you? No? I thought so.

Yes, it does!
And more or less uncertainty about causes and effects of PLs
in production use is the only common base we have for making
decisions, right or wrong. Partial knowledge is all we
will ever have, still it is something to build on.

Nevertheless, this is where *Ada* started, AFAIKT:
Some of the effects of using more than 400 PLs in one large
organization were pretty well diagnosed. A catalogue of desirable
PL properties was drafted, and reviewed. Looking at
the outcome, my conclusion is that this large research effort
did suggest answers to some of the questions of this co-thread
about redundancy, explicit typing, or robust syntax (To see
highly sensitive syntax typical of the Bell labs tradition ;-),
try

struct s {
   int a;
}

int main()
{
   struct s x;
   return 0;
}



> Well, things have changed, but you're probably missing how.

> George, you're not trying to find out things, but to win. At, I might
> say, every price. 

I'm only trying to draw attention to some findings when
programming is observed as caused by programmers using programming
languages. This includes findings about old and new languages. [*]
 Any findings are important because they can affect decisions.
As a consequence of these, they will potentially affect the amount
of money spent, the technical qualities of solutions and the
time needed to produce. I'm trying to allude to data to again be
placed in a frame of reference for language design decisions.

But I understand you are convinced that OCaml, if you let me name
it as a representative of a few things, answers many of the
questions best. So do I, to some extent.

Yet, if conviction is all there is, then indeed we loose the
common ground for a discussion.


[*] Comparing, say, Ada and Haskell wrt understandability,
neither is intuitive enough for my taste, though not always
for the same reasons.
Some language properties are hidden away, even when they are useful,
or important to know for runtime behavior.

- Like Ada tagged types being aliased therefore you can
have 'Unchecked_Access to function parameters...

- Like the Haskell expressions
 sum [1 .. n] or foldr (+) 0 [1 .. n] should almost certainly
be rewritten. The programmer has to find out why and how. Yet,
the first expression is so nice and straight forward and reflects
almost exactly what Hughes has suggested in 1984...