HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Computerphile has a great video on Lambda Calculus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eis11j_iGMs

Do you know Haskell? If not, I suggest you get accustomed to the language, and then read about monadic parsing [1] through Graham Hutton's work. Graham is a famous CS professor at U Notthingham, appears often in ComputerPhile [3,4], and wrote a book on Haskell [2].

I had to write an interpreter, optimizer and engine for a declarative language plus bottom up knowledge base in Haskell as part of an assignment, and an exam in a graduate course on advanced programming. Haskell made the problem significantly easier compared to languages I am much more comfortable with, like Python or C.

[1] www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/pearl.pdf

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Haskell-Graham-Hutton/dp/...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-y-6csu5WGm29I7JiwpnA

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eis11j_iGMs

⬐ PartiallyTyped

Okay, this is really perplexing, this reply was at +5 and is now at -1. I don't understand why and I'd appreciate any explanation.

The Computerphile segment is pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eis11j_iGMs

Related : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eis11j_iGMs

I also mentioned FORTRAN.

A 10min investigation would bring fruit to your curiosity. But wth..

Lisp, scheme, closure, modula and smalltalk are the ones that come to my mind now that offer ONLY safe data access (modula3 has "unsafe" keyword, but only when talking to outside code). Actually R, awk, bc, shell and such are also like that, but not really general purpose. Languages that are "memory safe" by default, but include "unsafe" memory access (that come to my mind now) are C#, F#, C++ and such (Rust goes into this "category").

All functional languages are, AFAIK, "memory safe" by default (well.. you could make a functional language that lets you go out of bounds, but that wouldn't be a "pure" functional language).

In fact, as far as i know, there are more programming languages that ARE "memory safe" then ones that are not. One could just go over the wikipedia list [0] and.. list them out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

While somewhat on the topic of functional vs "Turing" languages, here's a couple of videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eis11j_iGMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPQD7-AOjMI

So.. the only thing that prompted you to talk about Rust is memory safety ?

EDIT:

> Why bring syntax as the first thing? What does that have todo with memory safety.

Because the question i asked was "Can i ask why do you mention rust ? By that i mean what prompted you to write about rust here and now." and your answer was (paraphrased) "they bout emphasize memory safety", as if that was the only defining factor of a programming language.

⬐ rdtsc

> C#, F#, C++

Ok if C++ is memory safe, what's a memory unsafe language then?

If concurrency units (threads, co-routines) share a heap they are not memory safe. In Rust they do but Rust provide compile time checks for make sure access is safe.

awk, bc not production level languages. I think you're being disingenuous there.

> the only thing that prompted you to talk about Rust is memory safety ?

Yes

> they bout emphasize memory safety", as if that was the only defining factor of a programming language.

If you know anything about both languages that's at the top of their features list, which I mentioned.

> I also mentioned FORTRAN.

Ah interesting. So initializing a variable in FORTRAN would put that in thread local / separate heap?

⬐ gens

> awk, bc not production level languages. I think you're being disingenuous there.

First of all, we are talking about programming languages here, not about how widely they are used in "production". I know that awk is used in one giant company to do an important thing (aka dealing with money). It wouldn't surprise me to find that bc is also used in "the industry".

On that note, the TIOBE index lists Java, C, C++ and C# as being the most widely used languages. Awk is number 33, just below Ada, Prolog and Erlang. Rust is not even on the list, a list where assembly of all things holds the 14'th place. (bc is in the same group as rust there)

Erlang is also used for plenty of "heavy" things, notably in the telecommunication and banking industries. Haskell is used by facebook for their spam filter. WhatsUp is written in erlang. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnX3B9oaKzw

> If you know anything about both languages that's at the top of their features list, which I mentioned.

Not everything is about "features".

> If concurrency units (threads, co-routines) share a heap they are not memory safe.

If you want to talk about concurrency you should mention "Communicating sequential processes", where from Rust did take some wisdom, but Go (as a popular example) went full in. Functional programming (lamda calculus) also lends itself extremely well to "threading", intrinsically so.

I think that discussions are about learning things, clarifying things and such "nonsense". But this discussion seems to be all about "winning at any cost". So.. goodbye.