Language comparison chart: suggestions?

[wtd]

Which aspects of various languages would you like to see compared, particularly in relation to students looking for a language to learn.

Please, try to keep it simple with "has this or not" features.

[btiffin]

• wtd's world famous Difficulty Rating (not famous yet perhaps, but go big)
  
• Compiled vs interactive
  
• Native vs VM
  
• Main Category; Functional, Logic, Array,OO etc...
  
• Garbage Collector?
  
• Declarative?
  
• Mainly Console vs Graphical
  
• Mainly IDE?
  
• Age, how often things change, version incompatibilities
  
• Reflective?
  
• "Fast" runtime?
  
• Unicode?
  
• Main reason for being; Educational, System, General, Special Purpose
  
• Bignums?
  
• Higher types Y/N; Associated Arrays?, Structure IO? etc

• Does Dan like it/approve its use at school, at home, at work?
  
• Does Tony ...?
  
• Does md ...?
  
• Most importantly Does wtd ...?
  

Cheers
P.S. As the old guy, I look forward to reading the first and last ... it'll carry weight imho

[Insectoid]

Applications of the language (what said language is primarily used for)

[gianni]

insectoid @ Sat Dec 13, 2008 1:33 pm wrote:

Applications of the language (what said language is primarily used for)

That could be very broad, and might be more fitting for a detailed overview of a language and not a quick comparison chart. Although some languages do have a specific purpose, many have a multitude of applications.

[Vermette]

To add to points already mentioned:

• What is the type system (not a yes/no but good to consider)
  
• Quality free compiler/interpreter
  
• Active community
  
• Quality intro literature
  

[md]

age
siblings/parents

[wtd]

A first draft.

Reasons for languages included:

• Turing - it's popularity here. For better or worse, it's what aspiring students here are going to have as their benchmark.
  
• Ruby - one of my favorites, and it has a fairly devoted community here.
  
• Python - quite popular in education and industry.
  
• C - students are likely to encounter this either in class, or as a friend's suggestion.
  
• C++ - much the same reasons as C.
  
• Java - see C and C++, except they're even more likely to see it in class.
  
• C# - less likely to see it in class, more likely to see massive coercive Microsoft marketing.
  
• O'Caml - one of my favorites, as it was what made functional programming understandable with its nice support of both functional and imperative approaches and good tools.
  
• Pascal - an old educational standby.
  

[Tony]

shouldn't Ruby's "compiled" also be "sort of", considering the availability of jRuby (and to a much lesser degree, IronRuby)?

[wtd]

Possibly. I am, however, listing information as it pertains to the "mainstream" implementation of each. This is purely a pragmatic consideration, as the comparison is skewed toward those learning the language. Experimentation with alternate implementations tends to follow.

This is also one reason I have not listed Scheme. The various implementations all have varying characteristics, and there is nothing that can reasonably be considered the default.

[btiffin]

wtd; Old guy jokey smurf
What? No BOLs? Where are the BOLs? SNOBOL, COBOL, REBOL. Come on, like the Tetris Bear said ... "What ever happened to the Unicon ... and the BOL?"

I'd like to say "Good list so far", but Konqueror shows the PDF as a hex dump. So I'll pretend;
Good list so far.

Cheers

[wtd]

Save it and open it with whatever KDE uses for opening PDFs?

[Insectoid]

Technically, couldn't any language have a compiler written for it to make a permanent binary?

[Tony]

Not if the language allows for evaluation of arbitrary code at runtime (eval statement). A "binary" would have to come with an interpreter build in.

[DanielG]

I think relative running time of programs should also be included.

[gianni]

DanielG @ Sat Dec 13, 2008 11:28 pm wrote:

I think relative running time of programs should also be included.

What do you mean?