Re: Experiment Proposal re Languages

[Franklin Chen <chen@adi.com>]

Jonas Nygren <ehsjony@ehs.ericsson.se> writes:

> I believe I saw something similar, to what Alan describes below,
> in the comp.lang.functional some year(s) ago. I can't remember what
> languages were included in the excersise more than C and some
> functional language. The C code was never completed I believe and
> the functional language, perhaps Haskell, were the most efficient
> in terms of man hours spent and lines of code needed.
> 
> Perhaps somebody else have a reference to this experiment?

You are probably referring to the report "Haskell vs. Ada vs. C++
vs. Awk vs. ... An Experiment in Software Prototyping Productivity",
available at
ftp://nebula.systemsz.cs.yale.edu/pub/yale-fp/papers/NSWC/.  There is
a link to this from
http://www.cs.yale.edu/HTML/YALE/CS/HyPlans/hudak-paul.html, which
contains other links of interest concerning Haskell and functional
programming in general.

> Alan Brain wrote:
> > 
> > Re Language Wars.
> > 
> > It's my contention that not all languages are created equal. That some
> > have definite advantages over others, all other things being equal. For
> > example, and to be non-contraversial, programming in binary is likely to
> > be less productive than in C, in general. And a language specifically
> > tailored to a problem domain is likely to be better than any
> > general-purpose language.

This observation is not necessarily in conflict with the idea of
fruitfully comparing general-purpose languages.  The report mentioned
above describes how Haskell, a general-purpose language, was used to
express a domain-specific language that was well-suited to the problem
domain.

If a general-purpose language has features that facilitate the
creation of domain-specific languages (see Paul Hudak's "Building
Domain-Specific Embedded Languages",
http://www.cs.yale.edu/HTML/YALE/CS/HyPlans/hudak-dir/position-paper.ps,
for example), and therefore increase productivity, then does this not
count as an advantage of such a general-purpose language over an ad
hoc special-purpose language?

-- 
Franklin Chen                     | chen@adi.com, http://www.adi.com/~chen/
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