TITLE: A Panoply of Languages
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 21, 2007  4:05 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
As we wind down into Christmas break, I have been thinking
about a lot of different languages.

First, this has been a week of anniversaries.  We celebrated
the
<A HREF="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/dayintech_1218">
   20th anniversary of Perl</A>
(well, as much as that is a cause for celebration).  And BBC
World ran a program celebrating the
<A HREF="http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/12/18/64/">
   50th birthday of Fortran</A>,
in the same year that
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-03.html#e2007-03-21T16_35_15.htm">
   we lost John Backus</A>,
its creator.

Second, I am looking forward to my spring teaching assignment.
Rather than teaching one 3-credit course, I will be teaching
three 1-credit courses.  Our 810:151 course introduces our
upper-division students to languages that they may not encounter
in their other courses.  In some departments, students see a
smorgasbord of languages in the Programming Languages course,
but we use an interpreter-building approach to teach language
principles in that course.  (We do expose them in that course
to functional programming in Scheme, but more deeply.)

I like what that way of teaching Programming Languages, but I
also miss the experience of exposing students to the beauty of
several different languages.  In the spring, I'll be teaching
five-week modules on Unix shell programming, PHP, and Ruby.
Shell scripting and especially Ruby are favorites of mine,
but I've never had a chance to teach them.  PHP was thrown in
because we thought students interested in web development
might be interested.  These courses will be built around
small and medium-sized projects that explore the power and
shortcomings of each language.  This will be fun for me!

As a result, I've been looking through a lot of books, both
to recommend to students and to find good examples.  I even
did something I don't do often enough...  I <EM>bought</EM>
a book, Brian Marick's
<A HREF="http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bmsft">
   Everyday Scripting with Ruby</A>.
Publishers send exam copies to instructors who use a text
in a course, and I'm sent many, many others to examine for
course adoption.  In this case, though, I really wanted the
book for myself, irrespective of using it in a course, so
I decided to support the author and publisher with my own
dollars.

Steve Yegge got me to thinking about languages, too, in one
of his recent articles.  The
<A HREF="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html">
   article</A>
is about the pitfalls of large code bases but, while I may
have something to say about that topic in the future, what
jumped out to me while reading this week were two passages
on programming languages.  One mentioned Ruby:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Java programmers often wonder why Martin Fowler "left" Java to
go to Ruby.  Although I don't know Martin, I think it's safe to
speculate that "something bad" happened to him while using Java.
Amusingly (for everyone except perhaps Martin himself), I think
that his "something bad" may well have been the act of creating
the book Refactoring, which showed Java programmers how to make
their closets bigger and more organized, while showing Martin
that he really wanted more stuff in a nice, comfortable,
closet-sized closet.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

For all I know, Yegge's speculation is spot on, but I think it's
safe to speculate that he is one of the better fantasy writers
in the technical world these days.  His fantasies usually have
a point worth thinking about, though, even when they are wrong.

This is actually the best piece of language advice in the
article, taken at its most general level and not a slam at
Java in particular:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
But you should take anything a "Java programmer" tells you with
a hefty grain of salt, because an "X programmer", for any value
of X, is a weak player.  You have to cross-train to be a decent
athlete these days.  Programmers need to be fluent in multiple
languages with fundamentally different "character" before they
can make truly informed design decisions.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

We tell our students that all the time, and it's one of the
reasons I'm looking forward to three 5-week courses in the
spring.  I get to help a small group of our undergrads
crosstrain, to stretch their language and project muscles
in new directions.  That one of the courses helps them to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-12.html#e2007-12-20T11_30_03.htm">
   master a basic tool</A>
and another exposes then to one of the more expressive and
powerful languages in current use is almost a bonus for me.

Finally, I'm feeling the itch -- sometimes felt as a need,
other times purely as desire -- to upgrade the tool I use
to do my blogging.  Should I really upgrade, to a newer
version of
<A HREF="http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net/">
   my current software</A>?
(v3.3 &gt;&gt; v2.8...)  Should I hack my own upgrade?  (It
is 100% shell script...)  Should I roll my own, just for the
fun of it?  (Ruby would be perfect...)  Language choices
abound.

Merry Christmas!
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