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Comment by georgeorwell | Hacker News Reader

Thanks guys, I guess I really have had some rough times. I like how Lisp and Assembler at the top of the hierarchy capture the two extremes. Some hypothetical language in the middle would be great, but maybe the best we can do is to straddle that point, e.g. with C++ and Python.

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Rather than straddle the middle, I think I'd go with as high-level a language as I could get, coupled with a simple low-enough-level language to get whatever performance benefits I needed. Some combo like Python/C, Clojure/Java, or maybe some other lisp dialect and C.

Lua is known for pairing really well with C.

> I like how Lisp and Assembler at the top of the hierarchy capture the two extremes.

Not really. I'd place Agda or Coq above Lisp.

I'm already having a hard enough time convincing the team at work to use Clojure!

Oh, Clojure is probaly more useful in practice. We also stick to a Haskell dialect at work, and don't dabble in Agda for production.

That is somewhat orthogonal. Lisp is better at abstraction than Agda or Coq or Isabelle or any of those ML/Haskell theorem proofers. To maintain the theme:

C if you are terrified about performance

Lisp if you are terrified about boilerplate

Agda if you are terrified about correctness

If you are terrified about all of these, then welcome to the world of engineering.

If you are terrified about all these, there is ADA.

Ada. Not an acronym.

Ada gives you neither the performance of C nor the abstraction- and boilerplate-removing power of Lisp nor the provability of Agda. This is why it is not used.

The performance is pretty close, actually (far more than Go, for example) : http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...

And yes, it is not used, only in some obscure and low profile projects : https://www.adacore.com/customers

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te... might be a better link to show how Ada performance compares to C: ranging from twice as fast to three times as slow, with a median in favor of C. It's true that it's pretty close. I don't know if those numbers are representative of how performance works out in the real world; any insights from your experience?

Golang, it's true, is in the 3×–10× ballpark.

https://github.com/languages/Ada shows Ada as the #52 most popular language on GitHub. The #10 most popular is Objective-C at 3%. Using R:

    summary(lm(log(c(25, 13, 8,8,8, 7, 6, 4, 4, 3)) ~ log(1:10)))

I derive that the Nth most popular language on Github is used in 24% * N -0.81 of projects, with an R² of 0.93. This suggests that Ada should be in use on about 0.98% of projects on Github, which makes me wonder why https://github.com/languages/Ada/updated?page=10 can only find 200 Ada projects that have been updated in the last nine months. (JS, the #1 language, has 200 projects updated in the last 22 minutes.)

That should be 24% × N ^ -0.81. The double asterisk I was using for exponentiation got eaten.

If you wrote an S-Expression syntax on top of Agda (or Haskell), you gain all of Lisps anti-boilerplatitude for free. There's of course also Template Haskell.

As it is, the static typing helps to avoid some boilerplate, too, indepedent of macros. In some sense, static typing removes, among other things, boilerplate tests.

>Not really. I'd place Agda or Coq above Lisp.

Because more than 10 people have heard of and use Agda or Coq?

C++ and Python pretty much run everything, everywhere. Standard, open languages are hard to beat when you want to fully control your development stack and not worry about future control issues. I wish go was an ISO standard like C++, I'd be more interested if it was.

> C++ and Python pretty much run everything, everywhere.

I don't think so. Last I heard, there was still a lot of COBOL out there.

COBOL gets all the hate but if they have a Big iron mainframe then they'll most likely be running RPG.

Only if it is AS/400 based systems.

RPG was more oriented towards mini-computers than mainframes, from what I recall. It's niche was the IBM S/36, S/38, AS/400 and iSeries boxes. I'm sure you probably could get RPG for your S/360 or S/390 or whatever, but from what I've seen over the years, it was mostly COBOL, PL/I, and MVS Assembler on the mainframes.

Yes, yes there is.

Most banks, and many other businesses that have been around 30+ years, are still running on COBOL.

It was popular because of its highly readable syntax and its fixed-point packed decimal math for financial calculations.

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