Topics

1. Languages
2. Drawbacks
3. Alternatives

C

• developed by Dennis Ritchie 1969 - 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs
• general-purpose, imperative, statically typed
• constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions
• "The new assembly"
• typical applications: OS, embedded systems
• Influenced by:
  • Fortran (John Backus, 1957)
  • ALGOL (Committe of 8, including John Backus, '58, '60, '68)
  • PL/1 (IBM, SHARE Committee, 1964)
  • B (Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, 1969)

C Standards

• K&R C, 1978
  • Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published The C Programming Language in 1978
  • the book served for many years as an informal specification of C, aka K&R C
  • large number of extensions
• ANSI C, 1983
  • large number of extensions led to the necessity of standardization
  • the American National Standards Institue (ANSI) formed a committee in 1983 to standardize C
  • ANSI C standard adopted by ISO in 1990

C Standards

• C99, 1999 - added:
  • inline functions
  • long long int and complex data types
  • variable length array, flexible array members
  • better floating point support
  • macros of variable arity
  • // single line comments
• C11, 2011 - added:
  • type generic macros
  • anonymous structures
  • better Unicode support
  • atomic operations
  • multi-threading
  • bounds-checked functions
  • better C++ compatibility

Erlang

• developed by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams in 1986
• general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language and runtime system
• dynamically typed, automatic memory management
• originally a proprietary language within Ericsson ("Er"), open sourced in 1998
• designed to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time, highly available, non-stop applications
• supports hot swapping (code can be changed without stopping the system)
• active, 18.0, 18.1 released in June, Sep 2015

Erlang Processes

• main strength in concurrency via light weight processes
• Erlang processes are not OS processes nor OS threads
• like OS processes, Erlang processes share no state
• processes communicate via share-nothing message passing, removing need for explicit locks
• processes are very light weight, only 300 words overhead
• millions of processes can be created without much degrade in performance

Erlang - language for fault tolerant distributed systems

• in GPRS, 3G, LTE mobile networks worldwide
• Yaws - web server
• Riak, CouchDB, SimpleDB - distributed databases
• ejabberd - XMPP server powering Facebook Chat
• Chef - configuration management tool re-written from Ruby
• RabbitMQ - Message Queuing Protocol implementation
• RPC proxies to ruby processes for GitHub
• WhatsApp, Goldman Sachs HFT programs
• Call of Duty, League of Legends, Battlestar Online game servers

Python

• developed by Guido van Rossum, released in 1991
• general-purpose, object-oriented, high-level scripting language
• design philosophy emphasizes code readability
• dynamically typed, automatic memory management
• "The new BASIC"
• "Batteries Included"
• active, 3.5 released in Sep 2015
• langauge proposals via PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals)

PEP 20 (The Zen of Python)

• Beautiful is better than ugly
• Explicit is better than implicit
• Simple is better than complex
• Complex is better than complicated
• Readability counts

Python Implementations

• CPython - official implementation, written in C
• PyPy - much faster JIT runtime
• Jython, IronPython - JVM, .NET runtimes
• Cython - python-like language with cdef type declarations, compiles to C++
• Numba - JIT LLVM compiler via declarator signatures

Python - language for Science and Machine Learning

• NumPy - matrix library that uses BLAS, allowing matrix calculations to be close to speed other languages using BLAS, even closer if used in PyPy
• SciPy, scikit-learn, BioPython, Sage, iPython notebook, Pandas
• many deep neural network libraries
• best supported language for OpenCV
• NLTK
• "machine learning" in github: 3337 in python, 2264 in Matlab, 1050 in R, 1006 in Java, 496 in C++

Lua

• created by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique, Waldemar Celes in 1993
• designed to be a general purpose scripting language with embeddability and extensibilty as primary goals
• lightest weight (180kB for full reference interpreter) scripting language
• first-class functions, GC, closures, proper tail calls, coroutines
• ~50% - 3x faster than python in general benchmarks
• dynamically typed,
• single data structure: table
• simple C API

Lua - language for Games, UI, and Embedded Systems

• Mods, including Minecraft, Half-Life 2, many others
• World of Warcraft UI subsystem
• Game Engine for Corona, Moai, and many others
• full or large portion of many games
• over 40% of Adobe Lightroom is written in Lua
• eLua - embedded software applications builder
• OpenResty - web server bundling Nginx core

Ruby

• created by Yukihiro Matsumoto (松本行弘) "Matz", released in 1995
• general purpose, object oriented, dynamically typed scripting language
• Why? "Didn't like Perl because it smells like a toy language. Didn't like Python because it's not a true object oriented language. I wanted a genuine object oriented, easy to use scripting language" - Matz 1999
• everything is a true object

  4.times do |i|
    puts i
  end

Ruby - language for web applications with

Javascript

• developed in 10 days by Brendan Eich in May 1995
• originally called LiveScript, renamed to JavaScript when shipped in Netscape 2.0 in Sep 1995
• designed to be a lightweight interpreted language used in a browser
• part of to the ECMA standard in June 1997, but no official "governing" body, hence no official logo
• fun fact - JavaScript is a trademark of Oracle
• predicted by Steve Yegge in 2007 to be "The Next Big Langauge" (web2.0 just coined 1+ years ago and ajax just a year ago)
• cemented its dominance with introduction of ajax (2005), jQuery (2006), node.js (2009)

Javascript - language for web and mobile

• "The new C", "The web assembly"
• now a "platform" - languages that compiles to javascript: over 100
• a real platform - WebAssembly (supersedes asm.js) - ports C code without modifications with less than 50% performance hit
• web worker - spawn workers that unblocks the UI thread
• server application and server with node.js
• native mobile applications with Titanium and React native
• non-native mobile applications with phonegap and many other frameworks

CoffeeScript

• developed by Jeremy Ashkenas in 2009
• (also creator of Backbone.js and Underscore.js)
• syntax heavy borrows from Ruby and Python
• most adapted alt-js language

C Drawbacks

• No runtime checking
• No strict type checking
• No easy object oriented programming support
• No exception handling support
• Not easy
• Solution: C++?, D?

Nim

• created by Andreas Rumpf, v0.6 release 2008
• high level, statically typed, imperative language
• fast compilation
• compiles to C and javascript
• supports both automatic and manual memory management
• macros, templates, inline, iterators, generators
• universal function call syntax
• fast GC supporting soft real time systems and pluggable GC module (3 supported)

Erlang Drawbacks

• Slow for heavy computations
• weird syntax
• String manipulation

Elixir

• created by José Valim in 2012
• functional, concurrent, general purpose language
• compiles to bytecode that runs on BEAM - the Erlang VM
• same fault tolerant, soft real time, non-stop distributed applications capabilities
• can call Erlang functions and vice versa
• builtin macros, pattern matching everything is an expression
• lazy and async collections with streams
• biggest usage in Phoenix Web Framework

Python Drawbacks

• Still not fast enough for non-matrix computations
• Not functional enough - Eg. lambda functions are limited and side effect functions do not return

Solutions

• PyPy - for speed
• Mochi - for functional programming - Yasushi Itoh, first commit Nov 2014

Lua Drawbacks

• indexes start at 1
• both speed and syntax are good, but can still be better

Solutions

• LuaJIT - for speed
• MoonScript - for coffeescript-like syntax - created by Leaf 2011

Ruby Drawbacks

• slow

Crystal

• created by Ary Borenszweig, release in 2013
• Statically type-checked but without having to specify the type of variables or method arguments
• Compile to efficient native code
• able to call C code by writing bindings to it in Crystal
• Have compile-time evaluation and generation of code, to avoid boilerplate code
• gaining momentum, 3.5k github stars

JavaScript Drawbacks

• truthy evaluation and type coercion not make much sense
• floats and integers have same type Number (64 bits, 53 bits max for integers)
• typescript and flowtype for typing

Livescript

• derived from coffeescript
• adds many features to assist in functional style programming
• supports pipes, list comprehension, partial application, function composition
• better require of files and functions