Hello,

Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?

To give you an idea what i am after:
Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
"The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp will be my first choice.

Thanks.

On Thursday, 15 March 2012 at 07:09:39 UTC, so wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?
>
> To give you an idea what i am after:
> Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
> "The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp will be my first choice.
>
> Thanks.

Not really a help to you, but I honestly have no idea why people *want* to use dynamic programming languages. There is very little benefit I see in having your core object structure be complete dynamic. I remember watching this Google tech talk awhile ago, about V8 and improving Javascript performance. At one point, the speaker talks about how cool Dynamic objects *can* be, but then goes on later to say that 90% of code isn't structured that way (and thus justifying V8's JITed hidden classes).

I think a language should be static first and dynamic second. C# does this nicely (anonymous and dynamic types, Link, etc) and I think D is at least partially there (in regards to dynamic objects) with std.variant + associative arrays.

I would advise Python. The only drawback it has, among dynamic languages
is that you need to be happy to work with forced indentation, which is not
a big issue, as long as you use a Python aware editor.

This is just a personal taste, feel free to choose another one if it better suits
your use cases.

--
Paulo


"so"  wrote in message news:uamqdkmnshxmvayeumbz@forum.dlang.org...

Hello,

Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at
least a few objective person. I want to invest some "quality"
time on a dynamic language but i am not sure which one. Would you
please suggest one?

To give you an idea what i am after:
Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
"The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp
will be my first choice.

Thanks. 

I have for three years worked in a web platform somehow similar to Ruby on
Rails, but TCL based, actually it was a kind of AOL Server clone.

The main benefit dynamic languages bring to the table is not requiring to
write types everywhere, duck typing, and the flexibility metaprogramming
has.

For example in our server, the ORM was able to do translations on the fly from
SQL 92' to the DB specific SQL, and also map classes and properties to tables
and columns on the fly. So adding new DB backends was quite easy.

Now that mainstream strong typing static languages are getting type inference,
a solution similar to std.variant or .NET dynamic, might just be the sweet spot
of both worlds. As you are stating.

--
Paulo



"F i L"  wrote in message news:hakctekpvjnkyjhxacoo@forum.dlang.org...

On Thursday, 15 March 2012 at 07:09:39 UTC, so wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?
>
> To give you an idea what i am after:
> Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
> "The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp will be my first choice.
>
> Thanks.

Not really a help to you, but I honestly have no idea why people
*want* to use dynamic programming languages. There is very little
benefit I see in having your core object structure be complete
dynamic. I remember watching this Google tech talk awhile ago,
about V8 and improving Javascript performance. At one point, the
speaker talks about how cool Dynamic objects *can* be, but then
goes on later to say that 90% of code isn't structured that way
(and thus justifying V8's JITed hidden classes).

I think a language should be static first and dynamic second. C#
does this nicely (anonymous and dynamic types, Link, etc) and I
think D is at least partially there (in regards to dynamic
objects) with std.variant + associative arrays. 

On 03/15/2012 12:09 AM, so wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few
> objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic
> language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?
>
> To give you an idea what i am after:
> Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
> "The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp will be
> my first choice.
>
> Thanks.

Why not having both D and Lisp (embedded).
Have a look at newLisp at http://www.newlisp.org

Quote
newLISP can be compiled as a shared library. On Linux, BSDs and other Unix flavors the library is called newlisp.so. On Windows it is called newlisp.dll and newlisp.dylib on Mac OS X. A newLISP shared library is used like any other shared library.

The main function to import is newlispEvalStr. Like eval-string, this function takes a string containing a newLISP expression and stores the result in a string address. The result can be retrieved using get-string. The returned string is formatted like output from a command-line session. It contains terminating line-feed characters, but but not the prompt string.
End Quote

Would be interesting to implement a toSExpression() template than ... :)

On 2012-03-15 08:09, so wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few
> objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic
> language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?
>
> To give you an idea what i am after:
> Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
> "The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp will be
> my first choice.
>
> Thanks.

If I use a dynamically typed language I always choose Ruby, if I have that option.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

http://rigaux.org/language-study/scripting-language/

On 3/15/12 4:09 AM, so wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few
> objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic
> language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?
>
> To give you an idea what i am after:
> Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
> "The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp will be
> my first choice.
>
> Thanks.

I suggest Ruby. You can practically change everything in the language and use metaprogramming. With Ruby you don't have to fight with the compiler (or interpreter). You feel free and have fun. Plus the standard library has lots and lots of methods you definitely will use and won't have to write from scratch.

On Thursday, 15 March 2012 at 07:09:39 UTC, so wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?
>
> To give you an idea what i am after:
> Of all one-liners i have heard only one gets me.
> "The programmable programming language". Is it true? If so Lisp will be my first choice.
>
> Thanks.

I'm not sure if it is subjective, but I think Lua would be a good one. Not because it is a great language. But is a simple language that embeds easily (LuaD).

I use D for scripting so I don't really have much suggestion on the Python/Ruby front. But bash is somewhat useful.

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 03:27:32PM +0100, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 March 2012 at 07:09:39 UTC, so wrote:
> >Hello,
> >
> >Not related to D but this is a community which i can find at least a few objective person. I want to invest some "quality" time on a dynamic language but i am not sure which one. Would you please suggest one?
[...]
> I use D for scripting so I don't really have much suggestion on the Python/Ruby front. But bash is somewhat useful.

Bash?? Are you serious?!

OK, I'll admit that bash is a very useful shell and has quite advanced scripting abilities... I mean, I use bash everyday myself, but as a *dynamic language*, bash scripting is simply atrocious.

Its over-zealous interpolation of everything it sees, often multiple times, is one such atrocity (from the POV of a dynamic *programming* language; I'm not questioning its usefulness in the context of *shell scripting*). This makes it nigh impossible to pass certain strings around to script functions without the shell eating some escape characters and breaking everything. You pretty much have to save everything in what amounts to global variables to prevent this, and even then every time you read/write to the variables interpolation takes place. So it's leaning-toothpick syndrome everywhere.

The shell's philosophy of having minimal functionality in the actual shell itself and delegating pretty much all complex functionality to external programs is ... useful from a shell scripting POV, but extremely inefficient from a programming POV. I always remember my first job, where a colleague was having trouble with a shell script that generated some reports required by the customer, because it was taking too long to run. When they called on me to help, I found that about 99% of the time was spent forking and exec'ing subprograms (with the associated I/O delays and whatnot). I rewrote the script in Perl, and the running time was reduced from more than 2 *days* to less than 2 minutes.

If I were to recommend a dynamic *programming* language, it would be anything *but* bash!


T

-- 
"Holy war is an oxymoron." -- Lazarus Long