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Frink

The examples alone were enough to make me download and try out Frink; the fact that it is also a quite useful, and practical language helped a little.

By tomaco at 2004-11-22 21:18 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 6631 reads

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What's the big deal?

I am not sure what makes Frink special. Care to elaborate?

By Ehud Lamm at Thu, 2004-11-25 14:18 | login or register to post comments

I've no idea

but mentioned examples are pretty amusing :-)

By Michael Walter at Thu, 2004-11-25 20:24 | login or register to post comments

Barrier to Entry

Well, I can tell you what I think the big deal is, anyway. It's easy to do things I would otherwise never do.

This is something I try to tell one-trick-ponies...er, programmers... when I'm pushing them to learn a language other than C. The issue is not simply that I can write a Ruby program in 1/10th the time I can write that same C program. The issue is that, frequently, I will never write that C program! From a practical standpoint, in the realm of tasks I tend to use Ruby for, Ruby is infinitely more productive.

What I love about Frink is that it opened up a new realm of tasks that I would never have bothered computing before. How many languages do that?

I'll admit, the way I use it, it could very well just be an app... but it's pretty cool that it's also a language, and that if I want to push it just a little bit more, ask a little bit more of it, no problem; there's a whole language right there.

By Chris Pine at Thu, 2004-11-25 20:48 | login or register to post comments

Numerical Chameleon

It's nice to see units given proper importance. My favorite Java tool for unit conversion is Numerical Chameleon. (Ehud, it's localized in Hebrew.)

The author's examples were un-scientific with Noah's Flood. I know he was just having fun. The actual flood account talks about "all the fountains of the great deep broken up," not just water from above. See Global Flood, husbandry study, flood traditions of the world. The flood is one of mankind's most fascinating ancient memories.

By Mark Evans at Fri, 2004-11-26 22:19 | login or register to post comments

Well

From what I can tell the examples are nice but aren't unique to Frink. The linguistic feature that stands out is support for unit arithmetic. Right?

By Ehud Lamm at Fri, 2004-11-26 22:57 | login or register to post comments