data ecosystem

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 07:39 am, Man with No Name wrote:


>> Pretty much any programming language *could* have an interactive interpreter,
>> if somebody spent the effort to build one.
> 
> Are you sure?

Yes.

>> The thing about re-useable software components is that it turns out that most
>> of them aren't that re-useable.
> 
> Exactly.  I think you're onto something, this re-useability thing.  That is
> why I argue that the goals of re-useability can be realized with making all
> objects have a standard API.

That whizzing noise you heard was my point flying just over your head.


>> > I quite like the idea that vigil (see github)
>> 
>> What is vigil, and what does it have to do with github?
> 
> It's a software project over at... github,.

You should have said, and provided a link.



>> What makes you think that "standardizing objects across the ecosystem" is
>> something that should be done?
> 
> It makes it easier to reuse code just as your high-level language of choice
> allows you to standardize the way you access the underlying machine.  Get it? 

There's only a limited number of underlying machines. The programming ecosystem
has an effectively infinite number of problems to solve. Being forced to use
your solution to some problem does not necessarily make it easier for my to
solve some slightly different problem. Hence my point about software
re-useability.


> It's pretty cool.  There are exabytes of data out there, most of it pretty
> categorizable into probably log(N) categories.

Oh, it's "cool" is it? Then we should definitely do whatever is "cool" this
week.

By the way... are you aware that OOP is just one programming paradigm out of
many, and despite the hype that it was going to solve all our programming
problems, it has turned out to be far from the silver bullet that proponents
claimed it would be?


>> Such a programming monoculture would be a
>> terrible mistake.
> 
> Hmmm.  Is python becoming a "programming monoculture"?

No.

> Shouldn't you use some C and Haskell code in there too?

How do you know that I don't?

Plenty of people use C, Fortran, Java, R and Julia code in their Python
projects. If you've ever used numpy, you're using C or Fortran. I don't know
about Haskell -- I suppose somebody has built a Python/Haskell interface by
now, but I don't know for sure.


> Thanks for your educated input.

I detect a note of sarcasm. You did ask for our opinion -- if you had only
wanted people who agreed with you to answer, you should have said so.




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.