Today is F# day

A co-worker sent me a link to an article on F# this morning, which was fairly light on content, and Larry O'Brien mentioned it today as well. Then I saw that the article hit Slashdot, and is now getting mentioned on ll1-discuss, where Russ Ross pointed out that it's not a new story and that Jason Bock keeps a list of .NET language implementations. Which makes me wonder why F# seems to have captured so much interest where earlier mentions of, say, S# didn't.

Also, Larry O' Brien says "it struck me that the biggest practical advantage of strong typing may be IntelliSense", which leads me to wonder if the next question is "why do we need IntelliSense?". John Lam is wondering about dynamically typed languages: "I wonder if it's just me, or whether the community that I frequent has this on its collective consciousness, but I've been spending quite a bit of time wondering about the benefits of dynamically typed languages." It's not just you, John.

— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link

Human Readable or Computer Executable

Today I read a paraphrase of the Perl design principle that went "programs are meant to be easy for humans to write, and only incidentally for people to read". Contrast that with Donald Knuth's statement that "Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute". While those statements aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, I think that where you stand on those questions says a lot about how you write code and what kind of language you prefer.

— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link