Link o' the day: Meditations on Bluish Coder and inadequacy

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Tommy McGuire

Every once in a while, I run across someone who makes me feel inadequate. (As opposed to the people I work with every day, who make me feel completely adequate.)

Recently, I have been interested in programming languages with dependent data types, mostly because they seem to be the natural end point of type system evolution. (Perhaps "end point" is the wrong term; "next step" may be better.) Unfortunately, most of the dependently typed languages I have seen are unappealing for various reasons.

Epigram seems neat, but the last time I looked at it I seem to recall it only worked within its own IDE. Not a terrible failing, but still.... And version 2 is not out yet.
Agda also seems neat, but for some reason I am having a hard time getting enthusiastic about it.
Coq is neat (there may be a trend here), but as a programming language? Certainly, it is the best computer game I have played in ages, but one issue I have is that I find Coq proofs almost unreadable. It does get lots of extra points for Coq'Art, a truly excellent book.
Many of the others that I have heard about are not actively developed.

However, there is one alternative with a significant feature: ATS has excellent placement in the computer language shootout. (Hey, that's how I found OCaml, which quickly became my last favorite programming language.) Plus, the current implementation is named "Anairiats", which is both cool and enigmatic.

To come back around to the point of this post, I was casting around for more information about ATS, and found Bluish Coder, the blog of Chris Double, who, judging by the tags and posts, seems to have already done most of the things on my to-do list. Scheme in Javascript, ATS, continuations, factor, etc., etc. Worst of all, he's in New Zealand.

Damn, I'm inadequate.

[Edit: Yah, and I can't even remember to tag my posts.]