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Too Many Programming Languages

sapan.svbtle.com

5 pointssupster6 comments

>Then we could all write in our favorite languages and make sure the code is transplied to Lisp - just a thought.

I read this as:

"There are too many programming languages. Why can't everyone just use Lisp?"

I laughed a little to myself due to the Lisp user stereotype of parading Lisp around as every programmer's savior. Did it come off that way to anyone else? I don't mean to offend, as I rather enjoy Lisp too. But I felt the premise of the article was "all code should transpile to other code" and I ended up reading it as "all code should be Lisp".

Maybe that was the intended humor. Maybe humor wasn't intended. Either way, I got a laugh out of it.

There are a ton of libraries/wrappers use to run X code in Y language or middle-men. Rubypython [一] comes to mind. While it doesn't fully cover the problem it's a start. However is that method the one we want to use? Does a better method even exist or is a better method even possible?

[一] http://rubypython.rubyforge.org/

Lol, OP here, I guess in an indirect way that's how it came off. I don't really think everyone should write in Lisp, but rather that we all should be able to write interoperable code, and one suggested solution is a tree like structure - which happens to be Lisp. Maybe a Unix pipe type construct would be better? Just some thoughts on a lazy Thursday afternoon.

This doesn't work because there are a number of semantic distinctions layered even on top of Lisp-like syntax tree, and all those languages have different semantics. Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, and Arc are all Lisps, but you can't use code written in one of them inside a different one.

The way you get language interoperability is to define a common data format and a common way of indicating which code will execute next. A number of standards do this - platform ABIs, C calling conventions, LLVM/JVM/.NET bitcode, RPC frameworks like gRPC/Thrift/CapnProto/MessagePack/JSON-RPC/Avro - but they're all lower level than you would normally want to program in.

Projects like zproto [1], by using the "Universal Code Generator" GSL [2], have maybe already found the "common denominator" you are looking for.

[1] https://github.com/zeromq/zproto

[2] https://github.com/imatix/gsl

I suggested something similar to this a while back: http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Tech_20Spec_20Plugins

Here's a crazy thought: we already have a common denominator -- IPC.

You can write part of your program in Java and other part of it in Python. But the cost of transmitting messages is considered too high most of the time.

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