Kevin's Weblog

Continuing through Alexandrescu (chapter 3 now), the thought that keeps coming to me is, why not just write in a functional language? The techniques of template meta-programming draw so heavily from functional techniques; so much that to someone familiar with them, the term "meta-programming" just sounds like hype. If you were using a more powerful programming language, there wouldn't be anything "meta" about it. I mean, he talks about typelists as if they were the second coming, but there's nothing remarkable about them. Virtually every language other than C can do it without the need for all these gymnastics.

Going back to my question to myself from a couple weeks ago, I think I know why I started getting so interested in languages. At some point a couple months ago, I realized that in my next job, I'd like to use a language I actually like. Perl, I tolerate. Java, I tolerate. C, I despise. Gotta learn some more Python and see if I can get past my distaste for whitespace-as-syntax.

Interesting question. We know that OCaml is essentially as fast as C for a wide variety of simple benchmarks. I wonder if there are any comparisons for more real life applications.