Comment by mcguire

12 years ago

PowerShell? That's a new one....

I haven't used Idris, but as a proof assistant, Coq is one of the best computer games I know[1]. As a programming language, it's a very good proof assistant.[2]

[1] Really! It's fun. I've found the resulting proofs impossible to read, though. The closest description I can make is that they're programs for a stack machine; reading those is not a skill I've developed.

[2] All of the dependently typed languages, like Coq, that I've seen have not been very good programming languages, in my opinion. Except for ATS, which I don't think is a good programming language for different reasons. But I really like it, anyway.

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mcguire

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lmm  12 years ago

> All of the dependently typed languages, like Coq, that I've seen have not been very good programming languages, in my opinion.

Yeah, that's why I'm looking at Idris - it seems like the only one that's oriented towards practical programming. I did eventually get it installed, but it's tough going doing anything with it when you don't know Haskell tbh.

  • codygman  12 years ago

    > Idris - it seems like the only one that's oriented towards practical programming

    Whether you like ATS or not, it's very oriented towards practical programming. Also, ATS mostly looks bad IMO because of the style the author uses.

    I still haven't fully formed an opinion on ATS though. Idris does seem really cool and stuff like enforcing time/space usage through the type system excites me.

    • mcguire  12 years ago

      I'm not sure whether my issue with ATS is the style of the author or its type system, although I suspect the former.

      ATS is based on ML (the author started with Dependent ML), but the code has a very imperative feel, leading to statements like "let () = expr() in ..." and "let x = ... in ()".

      The stuff at http://www.ats-lang.org/Examples.html is just hideous, by the way.

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