The X10 Programming Language

[bensummers]

http://www.x10-lang.org/

[motters]

Bad choice of name. X10 is a system for modulating mains electricity supply in order to send signals, for example to switch lights on or off. A simple Google search would have told them this. It's probably not a good idea to name your new language in such a way that it can be easily confused with other kinds of technology.

[shawndumas]

lol [1]

-----

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)

[ax0n → shawndumas]

I was thinking of the same thing... And all the X10.com ads that were the pervasive bane of everyone's Internet existence in the late 1990s.

[Groxx → shawndumas]

It's also got to be one of the hardest language names to type. Shift+bottom row ring-finger, number-row far left, number-row far right.

(love the comment, btw. In part because I first thought the standard was going to try to make a comeback, from the title alone. Upon seeing it was a language, that was my exact reaction.)

[hugh3 → shawndumas]

Check out the FAQ:

Don't you know that X10 is the name of industry-standard communications protocol?

Oops. C'est la vie. Next question, please.

[eclw]

Wonderful user guides, but somewhat incomplete, apparently.

[helwr → eclw]

check out external links here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_%28programming_language%29

[ax0n]

Old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564795

[acqq → ax0n]

And as quesera here writes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565788

    1 //Tutorial file HelloWorld.x10
    2 class HelloWorld {
    3   public static def main(argv:Rail[String]) {
    4     x10.io.Console.OUT.println("Hello, World");
    5   }
    6 }

...ayfkm? You've already failed.

[Groxx → acqq]

omg, it gets worse than that. From their (incomplete!) online tutorial, which downloads an HTML file instead of displaying it:

>Xiom: The global/non-global distinction in X10 is intended to make you powerful, not miserable. This will not be obvious while you are getting used to X10.

(a (lame) play on "Axiom")

The tutorial documentation goes downhill even further after that. I'm having trouble deciding if this is real or an extraordinarily elaborate April Fool's day joke.

[tomlin]

Seriously? Couldn't have picked another name? :)

[lzimm]

hmm, X10 is to Erlang what Scala is to Java?

[wmf → lzimm]

Not really. Erlang is for reliable concurrent transactional computing while X10 is for parallel scientific computing. You might say that X10 aims to replace Fortan.

[p4bl0 → wmf]

Then it's doomed IMO, since there's Fortress (http://projectfortress.sun.com/) out threre developed at the Sun Labs and which seems to be a better candidate to replace Fortran.

[wmf → p4bl0]

DARPA funded X10 and Fortress at the same time to provide options for a future "high-productivity" HPC programming language; it's not clear that either one has gotten any traction yet.

[hugh3 → wmf]

Excellent. It's about time that something did.

Well really, C++ is rapidly replacing Fortran for scientific computing, but it ain't all that much better for it. I'm excited about the idea that this replaces MPI.

[p4bl0 → hugh3]

Physicists at my school/uni (in France) use Python with appropriate libs, but I don't know if it's the general case here, since I know physicists from near university use C++ (badly from what I saw, but that's an other story).

[hugh3 → p4bl0]

I'm a physicist, and I use Python (with scipy/numpy when appropriate) when I can get away with it (ie for small to medium-sized calculations).

For big calculations, though, where what you can do is limited by performance, there's no getting away from C++ or Fortran. Python has a huge performance overhead (I have learned this the hard way).