<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 18 April 2012 21:08, Nikita Beloglazov <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nikita@taste-o-code.com">nikita@taste-o-code.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im"><blockquote style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Tom Murphy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:amindfv@gmail.com" target="_blank">amindfv@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
I think that the idea is less to have a teaching tool, and more<br>
to have a way to "shop around" for languages, by seeing what each<br>
language is very good at.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<span></span></div>Yes, Tom is right. Idea is to show what each
language good for, to excite about it.<font color="#888888"><br>
</font></blockquote></div><br>Yes, I get that. It's a bad idea. Showing atypical "promotional" cases for each language encourages
faddishness and silver bullet cults; it's irresponsible and
unprofessional. If you're shopping around for a language then nothing is worse than
selected sweet spot cases. Unless they are a fair-ish benchmark for a
language that excels in a clear area, like R, APL and Awk and you're
looking for a glorified DSL. <br>
<br>I'd say that its better to have the same tasks for each language if
you're evaluating a general purpose tool. Obvious ones would be, from
simple to complex: <br><br>
- Some of the unix command line utilities like wc (some of these might be single liners)<br>
<br>- OXO, Caesar cipher (10 lines or so)<br>
<br>- The Markov chain program from the Practice Of Programming <br><br>- Life<br><br>- A simple spheres only ray tracer like the one in Graham's Lisp book<br><br>- A simple calculator program like the one in Hutton<br>
<br>- The recursive 2D shape program I've mentioned in other posts today <br><br>-
A version of the classic Traveller/Elite trading system - a really nice
little toy business rules system that can be code either minimally or
to show off the funkier features of a language to get more flexibility
and more interesting pricing rules. Minimal version would be a few tens
of lines and the config file declaring items.<br><br>If you want to see a language comparison done responsibly, look at Kernighan and Pike's "Practice Of Programming."<br>