Disqus - Latest Comments for Greg M

Re: Why Make Erlang a Functional Language?

Greg M — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:17:25 -0000

Nice article, the core point is very sound, but a couple of minor flaws: Firstly the syntax of Erlang comes largely from Prolog as you said, but Prolog is not a functional language (and one might argue that putting so much syntax from a logic-programming language into a functional language is a big part of what people are complaining about with Erlang syntax). And secondly I don't believe that too much work has gone into using the immutability properties of Erlang code as a basis for compile-time optimization, although in theory it's certainly possible. Unfortunately Erlang only has the nice properties of functional languages at the smallest scale, the explicit fine-grained concurrency makes it harder to reason about on a larger scale.

Re: Network Programming in Erlang | 20bits

Greg M — Sun, 04 May 2008 03:10:23 -0000

"so-called modern languages like Java, Ruby, or Python"

What? Who so-called them that? None of those were even modern when they were designed, let alone now.

Re: More factor: tabular to triples

Greg M — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:01:39 -0000

I prefer the Haskell list comprehension version:

[(i,col,cell)|(i,row)<-zip [startid..] rows, (col,cell) <- zip cols row]

Now I wonder how this will get formatted? Need a preview button.

Re: The Factor Attraction

Greg M — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 02:37:36 -0000

There's a lot to be said for languages that make it hard to write bad code. Oh the painful, wasted hours I've spent wading through code in languages that make it easy. I like this effect in languages with bondage-and-discipline type systems in particular - it's neat when the penalty for writing bad code is having to document it rigorously enough to justify it to the type system.

Re: c++ i'm not coming back

Greg M — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:08:00 -0000

You can't be unaware that Python has these kind of quirks in abundance? And without necessarily having the well-considered reasons behind them C++ does? Sure, it's a little better, but if that's the reason for your journey, Python is a bizarre choice of destination.