3rdAccount

Even though it doesn't look like it, I could've sworn Prolog was homoiconic.

Smalltalk can also do a lot of the cool lisp wizardry. I know Alan Kay (a user on here who was on the team that designed Smalltalk at Xerox-PARC) likes both langs. I've never heard him describe what he thinks are the pros and cons of both though.

You can write a lisp in a few lines of Forth. I've never done it, but people talk about it a lot, so I'm going to assume fact.

Apologies. That makes sense to me too off of the way I've heard it pronounced.

Does anybody in the industry know why there was a push to move away from specific role planes that excel in one area to ones that can do any area decently? I know in theory that there would be savings having one platform, but making one jet modular for 3 different roles is seeming to be more difficult than just designing 3 different jets. It can't beat the EuroFighter in a dog fight and can't match the stealth bomber for ordinance carried (actually a guess...please correct me if wrong) and can't match the A-10 for ground support. It just seems like a massive mistake that is now too big to fail.

There are a lot of Cobol replacement projects underway. Yes, it'll still be around for awhile, but there's less of it in the wild every year. The sad thing is that many companies prefer the mainframe Cobol service as it has run reliably for decades and the Java replacement does not have that trait.

I've seen short python programs (5 pages of code) mutilated with over architecture and boiler plate from a Java dev. The great thing about python is that short scripts of a few pages don't necessarily need a class if you're doing something super basic.

Was going to say that Julia might be the long term best open source replacement for closed source scientific computing (Matlab, Mathematica...etc). In some ways it is already just as good, but in others, it has a long way to go. From a speed perspective, it is top notch.

I was going to say "no" to embedded, but micro python and other projects work on some controllers I think.

Picat language was also mentioned recently and it has logic programming facilities.

They are in different niches to a degree, but when you have a language like Nim that is as easy to use as Python, nearly as expressive as Python...etc, then you might go ahead and choose Nim over something like Perl6 as it is so fast and distribution is just a binary. C++ is in a different ballpark than Perl6, but not Nim & Crystal. They overlap to the slower lang's detriment.

Perl5 definitely isn't the future IMO, but many will point out that neither is Perl6.

Perl5's CPAN is still very useful, the language is still available on most UNIX systems, it has some really nice OO modules like Moose, and the community still has lots of conferences and releases regular updates. I personally prefer Python in this space though.

Perl6 on the other hand is gorgeous. You can write beautiful OO, FP, imperative...whatever code. Grammars and MOP are great. The parallel support is cool and the Unicode support is top notch. You can also do really cool stuff not normally seen in scripting languages like restrict the type going into a function to be a non-negative integer in the range of 1..10 kind of like in Ada. The downside is that the language is still immature and adoption is slow. The VM is getting better, but with things like Nim, Julia, Crystal(fast languages), Perl6 is a tougher sell.

MiniZinc should've let you farm out your problem to CBC if it could be made into an LP or MIP problem. CBC isn't as good as CPLEX or GUROBI, but is great free software that can run massive scale models.

Maybe saying some of that can't be formulated as LP/MIP?

Ah, thanks for giving some context. Since I work in an industry that has our main problems being LP & MIP, I can see no reason to not use a general purpose language like Python or Julia to talk to an industrial solver like Gurobi. However, if I worked for a firm that did all sorts of optimization work (I'm jealous of anyone who does this), I might have to determine how best to formulate the problem and maybe MiniZinc is helpful there.

I agree with you here. I think MiniZinc is more like a free/open-source version of the AIMMS modeling language, although AIMMS seems to have better I/O facilities.

Thank you for the explanation. Any idea why one would choose to use CP over an LP, IP, or MIP solver? Maybe some CP problems can't be translated? I'm not sure what the mathematical relationship is.

Pulp and Jump are interfaces to CBC, GUROBI, CPLEX, XPRESS...etc. They can do LP, MIP, IP, and Nonlinear optimization to a degree. These are used for massive scale optimization problems as you've indicated. When I look at constraint programming, it looks usable only for problems of a small fraction of my model's size I guess. It looks like the flatzinc language that minizinc compiles to has an interface to GUROBI, CPLEX, & CBC. So at least it can be used as a modeling language.

Btw...Picat looks like it has similarities to Minizinc.

Can someone explain why I would use this instead of Python + Pulp or Pyomo, or Julia + JuMP.

What types of problems does one use constraint programming for? Large optimization problems require something like CPLEX usually.

YouTube still works great on WP, but I've never tried looking for an app.

It's amazing what scripting allows one to do. If I was in charge of hiring any technical roles, any non-developer job would still require basic coding proficiency, or at least a candidate who agreed to seriously give it a shot and try to learn.

Agreed. Most Excel stuff is extremely well documented on Stack Overflow, numerous blog sites, and message boards. I wrote a fair amount of VBA today(something I've only done a few times before) and found it to be quite straightforward.

So a gaping security vulnerability built-in?

This is pretty cool from a low powered 144 computer chip.

http://www.greenarraychips.com/

Are you just saying the old approach is better than docker containers everywhere? I think each probably has a place.

No, but Cobol + bank experience is different. There's the whole business terminology and overview you need to have to actually understand and fix the code.

There were many HN articles on that...was it last year?

Can you explain the Fuschia part in more detail?

Isn't Myrddin another name for Merlin or something...maybe Latin?

Myr is too much like Mir (Russian space station).

Edit: Wikipedia search says it is Welsh for Merlin & Merlinus is Latin for it.

Thanks. I might have to check it out after I finally finish Petzold's CODE.

Which one of his books covers how to build a computer, and is nand2tetris better?