Languages

I am always interested in new languages. I enjoy learning new ways of thinking about problems. While I was catching up on 6 months of unread NetNewsWire feeds, I read r0ml's post on languages and felt compelled to respond. r0ml doesn't seem to have comments or trackbacks enabled, but perhaps he'll see this in his referrer logs.

I was talking to a friend of mine about CPU megahertz, Moore's law and the laws of Physics, and the increasing need for programmers to be aware about concurrency. We started talking about one good way of scaling applications to multiple processors, vectorization. The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about vectorization (besides Altivec) is APL, thanks mostly to r0ml. So I did a search for "apl mac os x" and one of the first things that comes up is APLX. I don't know if r0ml has looked at this and discarded it as unviable or uninteresting, but it looks promising.

Smalltalk is another language that I like very much. The syntax feels so much easier to read. Smalltalk has historically not integrated well with it's environment. ambrai Smalltalk looks like it is on the way to fixing that problem. Not only does it very tightly integrate with the Mac OS X gui, it even appears to have command-line integration features.