denkspuren

It was an experiment -- and it went much better than I had imagined: I used Factor (a concatenative programming language) as the subject of study in a project week at Heilbronn University in a course called "Software Engineering of Complex Systems" (SECS). Maybe we are the first university in the world, where concatenative languages in general and Factor in specific are used and studied. Factor is the most mature concatenative programming language around. Its creator, Slava Pestov, and some few developers have done an excellent job. Why concatenative programming? Why Factor? Over the years I experimented with a lot of different languages and approaches. I ran experiments using Python, Scheme and also Prolog in my course. It turned out that I found myself mainly teaching how to program in Python, Scheme or Prolog (which still is something valuable for the students) instead of covering my main issue of concern: mastering complexity. In another approach I used XML as a tool ...

Recently, I had an interesting discussion about "What's the distinguishing feature of so-called scripting languages?" We easily agreed on calling Python, Ruby, Groovy, Tcl, Perl etc. as scripting languages. But then the trouble started: What distinguishes Python, Ruby etc. from Java, C#, C++ and similar languages? Is it dynamic typing? Are they more introspective? Isn't it so that meta-programming is no difficulty at all with scripting languages? Some whisper that a Python or Ruby programmer is as much as 2-5 times more productive than a Java/C# programmer. As a matter of fact, programs written in so-called scripting languages tend to be significantly shorter than their "unscripted" counterparts. Such a discussion typically moves over into an almost religious debate about static and dynamic typing. Programs in Python and Ruby might be shorter but they are unsafe because of dynamic typing. Static typing is the way to go for large programs being developed with...