A nice survey of #ProgrammingLanguages that allow you to omit semicolons:

“No Semicolons Needed”, Terts Diepraam (https://terts.dev/blog/no-semicolons-needed/).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47470200

On Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/09wmcz/no_semicolons_needed

#Programming #PLDI #Parsing #Lexing #Syntax #Grammar #Compilers

I’m incredibly tired of people posting with a (programming) language tag just to hate on that language. Their **words** are always: why said language is wrong and awful and no one should use it, or how the hell did this language become so popular when mine is obviously superior; but their motivations are never that sophisticated.

**Their** language thinks about the problem in some particular way, and they’re so familiar with that way of thinking that it has become part of their identity. The target of their hate thinks about the problem some other way, and that is now an affront to them … to their identity … to their sense of self-worth.

I prefer Python to Ruby (and I’m not a Ruby expert, so I could be persuaded). That doesn’t make Ruby bad or Python good! I prefer Rust to C++ (and by the way, I **am** a Python and C++ expert — and **not** a Rust expert!).

Don’t shut out alternatives! I’m not saying you have to love them or even **use** them; but they still exist because something in them has value! If you pretend they don’t, you’re just deceiving yourself. Like being a flat-earther. Figure out what you can learn! Grow! Keep using your favorite if it remains the best fit for your problem. Just use it smarter!

#Python #Ruby #Cpp #ProgrammingLanguages

#Cloudflare just dropped vinext - an experimental reimplementation of #NextJS built on Vite (not Turbopack).

• 1 engineer
• ~1 week build time
• AI-assisted
• ~$1,100 in API tokens

Designed as a drop-in replacement for Next.js, optimized for Cloudflare Workers - but still experimental and untested at scale.

Curious to learn more? Read on #InfoQ 👉 https://bit.ly/4brvE3c

#AI #SoftwareDevelopment #ProgrammingLanguages

So you want to know which programming languages are easiest?

Read more here:
https://www.devleader.ca/2023/10/23/what-are-the-easiest-programming-languages-to-learn-your-ultimate-guide/

#programming #programminglanguages

I was able to finish reading all of “The Genius of Lisp“ by @cdegroot and the whole book was as good as the free preview (chapter 8). I was able to speed-read through the detailed explanations of concepts I already knew, like tail recursion, garbage collection, the Y-combinator, Currying functions, and so on. But there were parts where I slowed down and read carefully, like the section on the Universal Turing Machine, and some of the details of the IBM-704 system architecture. Also the story of how the first Lisp implementation was created when one of McCarthy’s grad students implemented an M-Expression calculator, this was described in slightly more detail than what I recall McCarthy himself explaining in his 1960 paper — that or I had just forgotten those parts of the story.

The tone of this book reminds me a lot of popular physics books like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” which was aimed more at general audiences than professionals. That said, there is a lot to enjoy about this book for professionals like myself as well. There are many good stories about the principals designers of Lisp throughout. The sections on the commercialization of Lisp for the first AI boom of the 1970s and it’s subsequent “AI winter,” were very interesting to read. And if you are a teacher, you might like how some of the concepts in the book are explained.

And I would definitely recommend this very strongly to 3rd-year high school students, or 1st and 2nd year college students, who are more genuinely curious about how computers work and want to know more than just how to make the next billion dollar app.

The next #LispyGopherClimate show with @screwlisp I look forward to talking about this book some more.

#tech #software #Lisp #ProgrammingLanguages #SchemeLang #Scheme #Clojure #Emacs #EmacsLisp #RetroComputing #LispyGopherClimateShow