Re: [Nomen-dev] Nomen status

[Brian H. <bh...@sp...>]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Denis wrote:

> Hi Brian,
> 
> Nice to hear from you again.
> 
> I learnt CAML during my studies. Personally, that's not my cup of tea. 
> While type inference and program proofs are very useful, I just can't 
> enjoy writing functional programs.

This is interesting.  What is it that you dislike about Caml?  (Ocaml is 
basically Caml light plus OO- if you don't like Caml, you won't like 
Ocaml).

I also admit to not much liking Lisp- it's hard for me to keep track the
parens.  And the performance of Lisp sucks (still).  Ocaml has managed to
overcome both of these limitations, IMHO.  My main beefs at the moment are
with the shift-reduce conflicts (which grate on my nerves), and with the
lack of really good design by contract capabilities (it has a C-like
assert(), but that's all).

> 
> That may have to do with the fact that most functional programming 
> languages inherit from Lisp syntax... The nearest that I came to a 
> functional language that I wanted to use is Lustre 
> (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/halbwachs91synchronous.html).

Thanks for the pointer.  Interesting concept- I think that parallelism 
will be more important going forward, with the commoditization of SMP 
architectures (AMD's Hammer processors will introduce desktop ccNUMA 
machines to the market) and SMT processors (Intel is making all Pentiums 
SMT circa 3GHz).

> 
> If you have on your agenda creating a functional programming language 
> that keeps its distances with the Lisp tree structuration, I am 
> interested. If you are just thinking of extending OCAML, I wouldn't 
> follow you.

I'm not sure what my agenda is at this point.  Which is why Nomen has gone 
into deep hibernation.  Simply cleaning up the shift-reduce conflicts and 
adding DBC isn't enough, IMHO, to make a new language worthwhile.  And 
then, beyond that, you have the problem of getting your new language 
accepted- which is a set of trials and tribulations above and beyond 
simply getting the language to work.

Brian