Arc in Windows

Arc was released on 29^th January; just one day back; I started working with it in Windows. How to use our Arc in Windows; here is a quick way to start.

First thing first go to http://arclanguage.org/install and read the notes there carefully. It is a very small and well written guide how to get started in Arc. However for windows the first thing you have to do is to download and install MzScheme first. So here is the step by step guide to your Arc setup in Windows:

1. Download Arc.
2. Unzip Arc in a directory I use c:\Arc0.
3. Download MzScheme version 352(for Windows) from http://download.plt-scheme.org/mzscheme/ . You will land to the latest release download page which version 372. Click on the other version link and select V352 (as arclanguage.org suggests the use of v352; so please follow the canonical way.)
4. Once you have MzScheme installer run it. I have used C:\Program Files\MzScheme as installation directory you can use your own directory.
5. Go to your MzScheme directory and run the command Setup PLT.exe from the command prompt. Watch out for the line which says something like this:

setup-plt: Collection search path is

setup-plt: C:\[some-directories]\Application Data\PLT Scheme\352\collects

6. Go to this directory and check whether the path exits or not and properly populated. If not then create the required directories and sub directories and copy the collects folder from your MzScheme folder.
7. Everything should be ready by now do a cd to your Arc folder and run the following command:

mzscheme –m –f as.scm

That’s it start hacking Arc. If you have any problem feel free to post a comment will try to answer as fast as possible.

Logical Nirvana – How Programming Languages and Our Thoughts Are Linked

A programming language can change the way you think about programming; this is true but not the whole truth. Most of us when we code we try to think about a problem and we try to figure out how to solve the problem in a programming language. I do not want reiterate the same example of how BASIC does not allow you to think about recursion blah, blah, blah; but what I want to point out here is that at the time of solving a problem we actually solve the problem in our mind first and then we start coding. At the time of coding we start thinking in a programming language not before that. If some problem can be solved by a human being it can be solved by a computer. It may be tedious to put the logic but it can be done. Like as we have programs which can play chess better than most of us. So this simply means we just map our logic, which we develop in our mind, to a programming language.

Now this mapping requires us to translate the problem in a computer language. Now for example if we need to do an operation which is very low level we can do it very easily. But if the operation is complex we need to do a lot of sub operations, so at the time of translating the logic to a computer action we need to give bridging of more fundamental statements.

Now how a programming language can help you in doing this mapping? Simple it will provide you operations which are close to your logical system. It might not match the exact logical unit that you have in your mind but it can significantly reduce the number of statements that you write in that programming language. So if a programming language allows you to do some job in 10 statements and another programming language allows you to do the same job in 3 statements then it is better to use the second programming language. Plain and simple! But this is not so simple in this world and that’s why we have programming languages which require at least 4 lines to print “Hello World!!!”, moreover those programming languages are so called *MARKET LEADERS*.

Now let us return to our discussion on programming language and thinking process. The problem of mapping get worse if you are working in a programming language which is vary far from your solution in your brain; then you have to start from your end (Top-down approach) or from the programming language end(bottom up) and bring these two things to a single point and then it should work. What we are trying here is building of higher order logic from existing logical system in the programming language. So end of the day we are doing nothing but mapping of two logical systems.

Here I feel that the greatest realization of every programmer is what we are trying, while programming is not only solving a problem but also understanding our logic; the logic which lies beneath our mind. So the question is if a programming language does not allow us to think beyond certain point should we continue with that or let our thought go to wildest of imaginations where the boundaries are endless with a programming language that has no limitations.

So let’s reach out for that logical nirvana.

Thanks for reading.

A Tale of Two Loosely Typed Languages

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Disclaimer: I love JavaScript and this blog is not a defaming blog for JavaScript.

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We all know that JavaScript is a loosely typed language; there are advantages of being loosely typed. You need not to think about what will be the data types of a particular variable and work with that variable. But a newbie to a loosely typed language will miss a lot of details which is required to code in such a language. (As I am writing this I consider me as newbie in most of the cases in programming). But still this blog is all about the mistakes that we all make and learn from them.

If you are reading this blog I can safely assume that you have some interest in programming in languages like JavaScript, Lisp or Scheme which are strictly speaking examples of great loosely typed language. Albeit I have doubts in my mind about ECMAScript that it might not remain as loosely typed as now with its reserve words containing char, int, long, float etc. But nevertheless I will take presently implemented format of well good JavaScript which still allows me and other programmers to write code free from types.

The most important concept while programming in any loosely typed programming language is the understanding of how my function is going to behave on certain inputs. If the function is a pure function you need not to worry, however in WWW we do not write much of a code like pure functions. But even pure functions can behave absolutely insane if you allow them to do so. How? Here is a code for a function in JavaScript which takes two numbers as its arguments and adds them (If you do not know JavaScript you can click here for a tutorial).

function add(x,y) { alert(x+y); }

I call this function as add(4,5) and as expected it pops 9. Good now if I try to call this function like this add(“hello”,5) what am I suppose to get?

Let us now stop this for a moment and try the same function in Lisp, the function in Lisp should look like:

(defun add(x y) (+ x y))

Now if I call the function in Lisp like (add 4 5) it will evaluate to 9 but if I try to call this add function with “hello” and 5, we will be in the debugger saying something like ‘Argument X is not a NUMBER: “hello”’ (my Lisp is SBCL).

Now what happens in JavaScript it will pop you a message box saying “Hello5”. That’s right, the + operator in JavaScript does two things it adds in case of a number and it also concatenates strings and moreover when it finds a string in any side of it, it forgets the other job that it can perform and it just concatenates. That is ok for me a language can do that like Java does the exact same thing. So to be sure about what you want from your function you need to check your input for certain type before you do this addition operation.

In JavaScript I as a programmer has to make sure that all the arguments to the function are as I was expecting before I pass them to an operation. In our case it is addition. In Lisp we can we will use restarts using condition handlers. We need to understand here that first way is static checking and the second one is dynamic checking at the run-time. The importance of conditional restarts are more felt where we have to take care of more complex functions.

Evolution of Programming

The RISC architecture is good, as they say anything small and working is good! This is my fellow programmers is a philosophy of *nix*; how many years has gone by? Stupid thirty years and do not question it; because that’s the best idea we have got and we are following it. Doing great stuff, building systems on top of it, I agree. But has it ever came to your mind that why this is like THIS? Why we have to use the same old RISC for our computing? The answer is we have stopped innovating in the real sense. We now know that we need more data types, arithmetic operations and better instruction set to carry out an operation. But at the end of the day all we have is a *MOVE* or *STORE* or *LOAD* and we say that Lisp, Java or Ruby runs slowly. These programming languages are not close to low level and thus will take some time to actually execute it in our cute processors.

Tomorrow if we try to develop a programming language which is more higher level we will not be able to convince our bosses that this is the right way of doing things. Because they will tell us, “look at the performance man!” And an innovation will die. Once upon a time C was considered higher level language than machine language, yes true but you need to write a 20 lines of code to reverse a link list or worse link list is not a basic data types.

I do not blame any one but tell me is it fair to ask a student of computer science to write a link list reversal program in Java. I don’t think so. If you can declare link list as a data type and you have a method to reverse it please reverse it using that; and if your computer is taking more time to do that for link list of 10000 elements blame it on the computer not the programming language even if the C/C++ implementation is taking less time. This is because of the abstraction that this high level programming language is providing. C/C++ on the other hand is good because there is very low level abstraction in it and you have to build rest of the thing.

In programming world this is like saying to the programmer it’s my way or highway. So if the instructions set are evolved up to the level of say C then what happens? The magic starts then you can still program in C as now you still have a choice program in assembly language; but it will be better to choose a higher level language.

We have come from binaries to pneumonic to assembly, but we are long due for the next higher level let us just take the next step, and which programming language we should choose is up for debate…..or is it not clear?