[mercury-users] Mercury as a 1st class prototyping language ?

[david wallin]

>
>No, what I wrote was to the effect that I am happy to spend time writing
>declarations if/when it saves debugging time.


Great, so would I, but I would like to be able to do it when I 
actually see that it's necessary and not (necessarily) before.


>Oh, I've loved Prolog syntax for years.  That doesn't prevent me acknowleding
>the truth:  it's quite a bit bulkier than Haskell-like syntax.


Would you say that Haskell syntax has the same/better/worse 
readability (to a human eye) compared to Prolog syntax ?


>	7 lines of declarations can save 100 lines of code, is that on the
>	average ? Care to give an example :-) ?
>
>Where did you get those numbers from?  I never said anything about
>declarations saving lines of code.  What I talked about was **libraries**
>saving lines of code.  That is, if by writing a few declarations you are
>enabled to use a language whose implementation already contains most of the
>stuff you need, then it's rational to write those declarations.


This, I'm afraid, is the best reason there is to stick with Java, a 
language I really would like to get away from. What attracted me to 
Mercury was mainly two things:

i) Typeclasses seems to keep the best features of OOP: Polymorphism 
and Interfaces/Protocols.

ii) The Erlang like syntax. As you so eloquently put it : Java is a 
syntactic weirdo.


>Frankly, I think all the people who say "Language X would attract so many
>more programmers if you'd just make the changes I want" are wrong.  Look
>at Perl and Java.  Syntactic weirdos both.  The things that seem to make


I think the choice of syntax actually helped Java gain momentum. 
Gosling seem to have taken a lot ideas from Objective-C while 
foolishly/cunningly keeping the C++ syntax.


>for programming language success these days include
>  - availability on popular platforms (read "Windows", alas)
>  - extensive libraries (CPAN, tons of stuff for Java e.g. 
>www.alphaworks.ibm.com)
>  - books
>  - perceived utility to adopters


This together with "timing" is what gave them momentum, books & 
libraries follow so much easier when you gain momentum.



--david.

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