Semantic patching with Coccinelle

Posted Jan 23, 2009 1:37 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Semantic patching with Coccinelle by felixfix
Parent article: Semantic patching with Coccinelle

Looks to me like you're putting words in rwmj's mouth and then disagreeing with them. I don't see that rwmj has taken issue with Valerie's conclusions about the language choice.

Not every comment is a contradiction of the parent, and I wouldn't assume that "learn something new" was meant to say, "there's nothing unfortunate about the fact that this code is in OCaml."

Of course, I'm not really sure how "learn something new" does fit into the thread. The posts after it follow more obviously: you point out that learning something new isn't always the right thing and rwmj misreads that as learning something new is never the right thing and disagrees. While that position (learning something new is sometimes good) is obviously right, you respond as if he were arguing -- still -- that there's nothing unfortunate about the fact that this code is in OCaml.

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Semantic patching with Coccinelle

Posted Jan 23, 2009 5:41 UTC (Fri) by rwmj (guest, #5474) [Link] (1 responses)

I was just being sarcastic in that second posting. OCaml and Haskell are something new. They're not just exotic scripting languages - in the way that Ruby is just Perl with a different syntax. They are something considerably more powerful and expressive that can take programming in new directions. Unfortunately explaining this is a bit like the Paul Graham explaining LISP to "Blub" programmers.

Semantic patching with Coccinelle

Posted Jan 23, 2009 8:09 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Unfortunately explaining this is a bit like the Paul Graham explaining LISP to "Blub" programmers.

It's hard to find explanations that do a worse job of introducing people to Lisp. There's a good explanation of Haskell (PDF), including a bit of history, design choices and an overview of the functional programming paradigm.

Haskell, by the way, is roughly of the same age as Python, but is expected to become the next great programming language Any Moment Now. Or maybe not.