Updated: 11/5/2005; 6:04:05 PM.
Chris Double's Radio Weblog
        

Monday, April 28, 2003

I just added the weblog to GeoURL. There's a bunch of other people blogging who live nearby.
11:52:29 PM      

Ted Leung comments on a weblog posting by Robert Martin where he compares programming with statically typed languages and dynamic languages. The result being Robert finds he prefers dynamic languages and Test Driven Development.

It seems that Python and Ruby are really catching on as popular dynamic programming languages. It's a shame that Common Lisp, Scheme or Smalltalk don't get as much 'good press' as these languages already have many of the features that are just starting to appear in the more popular languages.

Part of the reason could be that for Ruby and Python there is only one implementation. Users can rely and trust and extend that single implementation. Whereas Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Scheme, etc all have many implementations. While this is good in terms of choice it means that code implemented in one may need to be ported to others so there is a bit of fragmentation there. And the user needs to decide on an implementation to use.

Ted mentions Dylan as a possible chance for a Lisp like language. The name Dylan comes from DYNamic LANguage. Andrew Shalit posted on comp.lang.lisp a few years ago that when they were working on Dylan, as the language developed more static features, some people joked it should be renamed to come from STAtic LANguage. This is perhaps a bit unfair and is probably because Dylan combines both static and dynamic typing and many of the developers working on it came from the heavily dynamic Common Lisp.

Gwydion Dylan is a Dylan implementation with reasonable development activity and runs on many different platforms if you want to play with the Dylan language.
11:23:48 PM      


Krzysztof Kowalczyk comments on a report on sales numbers for PDA/Smartphone devices. The report shows Symbian devices as 53% of the total sales. The next is Windows CE on 24%.

According to a Yahoo comment on the report 50% of data-centric devices, such as PDA's and wireless handhelds, came with Symbian installed and 90% of voice centric devices (ie. phones). That's a pretty impressive market share.

Although I'm not a great fan of the Symbian C++ API (See my previous weblog entry about this) I do like the Nokia 9210 device. And I know that Symbian are interested in having other languages (Like Lisp) available for development on the device.
11:04:32 PM      


© Copyright 2005 Chris Double.
 
April 2003
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30      
Mar   May



Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.

Listed on BlogShares

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.