Machine learning algorithms have a much better chance of being widely adopted if they are implemented in some easy-to-use code. There are several important concerns associated with machine learning which stress programming languages on the ease-of-use vs. speed frontier.Speed The rate at which data sources are growing seems to be outstripping the rate at which computational power is growing, so it is important that we be able to eak out every bit of computational power. Garbage collected languages (java, ocaml, perl and python) often have several issues here.Garbage co...

Now that Conrad Barski's Land of Lisp (see my review on Slashdot) has come out, I definitely think Common Lisp is the best language for kids (or anyone else) to start learning computer programming.Between Land of Lisp, David Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (really great book for people new to programming, available for free) and The Little LISPer (3rd edition, editions four and up use Scheme) you have three really great resources to get started.Lisp's syntax is a great advantage because it is so simple to learn and has so few special cases. The interactiv...

About a year ago I worked on a very interesting project which involved creating a unique world with all its history, people, physics, metaphysics and so forth. I like fictional worlds that are thoroughly created and I have always marveled at people like Tolkien or Richard Garriot who go such great lengths and even create languages for their worlds. I have since many years felt that it would be awesome to create my own language and I’m probably not alone in feeling that.When I started studying linguistics and computational linguistics many years ago I learned a lot about the behavior of ...

Since I started this blog, I have gotten quite a few emails asking me “What programming languages do you recommend for X?” I often finding myself writing something along the lines ofI would honestly recommend python. Something about me being biased because I know and love it.  Usually say something about the competing technology with a back handed insult. Also if they are starting out I would recommend a language that enforces better OO (Object Orientated) practices than python, like Java (don’t hate me but it’s true).Then I go on to say something ...

I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I dont really know about that; but what I do know what keys are pressed when writing with different programming languages. This might be something interesting for people who are deciding to select a programming language might look into, here is a post on the answer to the aged question of: Which programming language should I learn?As far as I can tell lang...

This post is part of our ReadWriteHack channel, which is a resource and guide for developers. The channel is sponsored by the Intel AppUp Developer Program. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: AIR for AppUp: What You Need To Know Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language). Unfortunately, it omits such influential languages as  Lisp,  ALGOL 60 and  Smalltalk. But inclu...

Some languages are complex, others are simple … right?  C++ versus just about anything else is a good example here.  But, it begs the question: what makes a language complex?So, I’ve just been reading Bruce Eckel’s Artima article on Scala.  It’s actually a nice article, and I enjoyed it.  But, one thing bugged me — and, it’s nicely summarised in this quote:But you can see from the code above that learning Scala should be a lot easier than learning Java! There’s none of the horrible Java ceremony necessary just to write â€�...