FYI, I came across this extremely helpful feature comparison chart of different languages which you can program the NXT in: http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html
I think, Wikipedia has got this one very right: A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer. The first sentence is enough to describe what it is: it is an artificial language (that is the root of it) it is designed to … Read more
It should be more common, but I suspect it is not because it makes parsing languages more complex. Benefits: Upholds the principle of least surprise Reads like math is taught Reduces cognitive load (see previous 2 points) Drawbacks: Grammar is more complex for the language Special case syntactic sugar As to why not, my guesses … Read more
Scala 2.11 added scala.collection.Searching to the standard library. It uses binary search for indexed sequences and linear search otherwise. import scala.collection.Searching._ Array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).search(3)
OK, I understood the subtle difference where function overloading is different from multiple-dispatch. Basically, the difference is whether which method to call is chosen at run-time or compile-time. Now, I know everybody’s said this, but without a clear example this sounds VERY obvious, given that C# is statically typed and multiple-dispatch languages (apparently to me, … Read more
Portability isn’t a black and white, yes or no kind of thing. Portability is how easily one can I take a program and run it on all of the platforms one cares about. There are a few things that affect this. One is the language itself. The Java language spec generally leaves much less up … Read more
It means “code as data” which is a general characteristic of Lisp family. (add 2 3) Just like above string, which is both a list and also a function call. The “Homo” prefix stands for this characteristic.
The good news is: You don’t need to use map or filter at all, you can use generator expressions (lazy) or list comprehensions (eager) instead and thus avoid lambdas completely. So instead of: lines = map(lambda x: x.strip(), sys.stdin) Just use: # You can use either of those in Python 2 and 3, but map … Read more
I’d say that before you begin you might want to take a look at the Dragon Book and/or Programming Language Pragmatics. That will ground you in the theory of programming languages. The books cover compilation, and interpretation, and will enable you to build all the tools that would be needed to make a basic programming … Read more