Was pointed to Why compilers are doomed by superant's Advodiary#

Sat, 17 Nov 2001 01:33:31 +0000

Was pointed to Why compilers are doomed by superant's Advodiary

I bristle when I hear the phrase "scripting language", because it seamlessly combines "great for quick hacks" with "vomit-inducingly ugly for anything more than 200 lines long or where performance is an issue", and although there's legitimately some kind of trade-off there I really don't believe it's the straightforward x + ay = k that people make it out to be.

Yes, it's good to use expressive high-level languages that have vast prebuilt libraries, that let you write "hello world" in a single line of code and execute it less than a second later without waiting for the compiler. That doesn't mean it has to be slow as molasses, have one implementation and no external standard, and have insane syntax or horrible support for building big programs.

<opinion>Any language you can't implement in itself is not general-purpose. Any language you wouldn't want to implement in itself is not usable. </opinion> Granted, that doesn't leave a lot of options.

Opinion on the article itself: so many other problem spaces in IT map onto something that has been solved as part of compiler design, that you'd be damn foolish to decide that compilers were not worth studying any more just because silicon is fast these days. I've never needed, say, to write a grep(1) clone, but that doesn't mean I haven't found finite automata theory useful on other tasks.