Re: dual-language systems increase modularity

[Steve Dekorte <address@hidden>]

On Nov 17, 2003, at 9:22 PM, Ken Shan wrote:
>> Ok, now which is easier to use and understand?
> First of all, it seems to me that you have changed the topic or your
> claim.  As Shriram pointed out earlier, your initial claim was that
> "dynamic typing makes available a whole new level of more powerful and
> flexible programming techniques", not that dynamic typing makes any
> programming technique easier to use or understand.

I assumed it was obvious that I wasn't questioning whether two Turing 
complete languages where capable of the same computation.

> In any case, it is certainly relevant to this mailing list which
> implementation of proxy/delegation is easier to use and understand.
> Given that what you wrote down in three lines of Io is equivalent (via
> Pierce and Turner's encoding) to a single line of System F, namely
>
>     fun(M: *->*) fun(p: Object(M)) p
>
> -- or a single line of Haskell, namely
>
>     id
>
> -- it is difficult to say with statistical significance which
> implementation is easier to use and understand.

I bet we can make a good guess by asking a few people that haven't seen 
F, Haskell or Io before. Personally, I can't make any sense out of the 
above. How does "id" let you set the target of the generic proxy? Are 
you sure you aren't confusing a generic type with a proxy? By proxy, I 
mean an object that takes most any message sent to it and forwards it 
to another object (or potentially over a socket or some other 
communication pathway).

> But perhaps you meant to compare not just the code that we have chosen
> to written down, but also the language implementation

I'm just interested in the code.

-- Steve