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Discussion on: Language Features: Best and Worst

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gavinfernandes2012 profile image
Gavin Fernandes

Alright, as far as I know, there are two general types of parsers, top down, and bottom up. Bottom up is more performant iirc, but is harder to get used to, while top down is less performant (O(n3) if you know what I mean, and iirc), but I hear that they're much simpler to work with.

Ohh before I elaborate further, I'll need to know what sorts of systems and tools you're used to working with. What language, OS, compiler?

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

In grad school I programmed in C/C++ for 5 years, now I'm mostly Java and R, but I'm teaching myself Haskell, as well. I work on Windows, Ubuntu, and macOS. If you're asking which compiler I use to compile my own code, just gcc or whatever's available. I haven't yet looked into anything for my language project.

I found this article while researching this and it mentions yacc, which I have heard of. I wasn't aware that bison is its successor. I don't know how yacc works, though, I just recognise the name.

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isaacrstor profile image
Isaac Yonemoto

Before you move forward with your project I strongly suggest you study Julia (as a replacement for R) and Elixir (as a replacement for Java). They're more modern languages so they've worked through a lot of issues in their recent, early pre 1.0 phases and have thought, hard and heatedly, about a lot of things you're looking at. Both are functional, and both are dynamic (I think strict adherence to staticity is a bit of a religion: Julia kills the idea that static = performance, because of its amazing compiler strategy, and Elixir + dialyzer kills the idea that static = correctness - I basically have no runtime errors with static typechecking engine, and the rock solid dynamic stability of OTP makes it way worth it - I'm a a relatively inexperienced dev, they just promoted me from junior directly to senior =) with a lot of freedom and in elixir I wrote a testing harness in three days for a senior coworker's go program (6 months in the making) that triggered both linux and go program panics/errors, while my harness (living on the same node and dispatching and monitoring tens of thousands of concurrent processes) was fine.

Moreover, both PLs focus on developer productivity and joy. I don't know if that's what you're optimizing for, but I suggest learning from some of the best!

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Thanks, Isaac! I'll have to explore a few more languages before I make a decision one way or the other. I'll definitely check out Julia and Elixir.