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   Sumana Harihareswara (brainwane@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Aug-2024 00:21:44 JST Sumana Harihareswara

   Conversation a few evenings ago:

   Me: Uggh - we have individual tools like Bokeh or HipHop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP to transpile from 1 language into another, but not general-purpose things so I can write in arbitrary language Foo and magically turn it into target language Bar. I want that more than I want a flying car

   Sensible friends: but that is inherently hard because of [genuine reasons]; WASM does seem promising though

   Me: And WASM is fun to say -- which is the most important thing

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     tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Aug-2024 00:22:08 JST tech? no! man, see...

     in reply to

     @brainwane there's a pro-lisp piece on gnu.org which basically says you should use lisp because it can cross compile to any language so you have ultimate flexibility

     utter nonsense of course, that doesn't actually work, but I distinctively remember reading it as a young programmer and being amazed but also frustrated that no one else had told me this!

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     Sumana Harihareswara (brainwane@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Aug-2024 00:22:09 JST Sumana Harihareswara

     in reply to

     Thus we discussed, briefly, which programming language *names* are most fun to say aloud, and I invite you to join me in this pointless entertainment.

     Which names of programming languages are the most pleasant when said out loud?

     I reckon COBOL and BASIC and FORTRAN feel pretty good. Julia: nice. Elm, Rust, Perl: I mildly dislike saying the consonant combo at the end. Eiffel came in for some praise.

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     Sumana Harihareswara (brainwane@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Aug-2024 01:07:48 JST Sumana Harihareswara

     in reply to

     @technomancy Sad that it does not work!! (I am depending on your assertion and my other friends' assertions here and have not tried it myself)

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     tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Aug-2024 01:08:16 JST tech? no! man, see...

     in reply to

     @brainwane you certainly can (and should!) do things like adapt the syntax from one language to compile to another; I'm doing this with https://fennel-lang.org for example that takes lisp syntax in and emits lua syntax out

     but there's only so much you can do in a compiler; the data structures of Lua are dramatically different from the data structures of Scheme to take just one example; even a question as basic as "what does nil mean" can have answers ranging from "we don't have any concept of nil" to "it's just another way of writing an empty list" to "it's zero lol"

     you can write a bunch of shim code to achieve the Scheme behavior on the Lua runtime, but since that can't be done at compile time there's a large runtime cost to it; I guess it's inaccurate to say that it can't be done, but it can't be done in a way that preserves performance