

"Third Hand" Languages - jonbeebe
http://jonbeebe.net/2012/08/third-hand-languages.html

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octopine
Is Haskell then a "Third Hand" language because it is compiled into C?

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ek
It seems like he's using the term "third-hand" to refer to languages that
merely undergo syntactic expansion in the process of translation to their
target language. In the programming languages community, we often refer to
this as a "desguaring" transformation, since when CoffeeScript is "compiled"
to JS, the syntactic sugar is removed and replaced with JS that exactly
replicates the semantics.

This is in contrast to Haskell, which undergoes a fair amount of static
analysis and optimization before code generation ever happens. Also, GHC
doesn't only output C, and doesn't even translate Haskell directly to C.
Instead, Haskell is transformed into C-- code, and GHC can be made to target C
to be compiled by GCC, as you say, or the LLVM intermediate representation,
or, most commonly, machine code directly.

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lucian303
"Third Hand" languages ... for young teenagers who have nothing better to do
and can't hack the real thing or think they are developing something useful.
Been there, done that.

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ojr
Javascript was made to be a target language ... Brendan Eich is a supporter of
the BYOJ ( Build Your Own Javascript) movement

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lucian303
That's because he knows how much his JS sucks as a language to program into.

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ToastOpt
Which is a good thing, because just about every language sucks, but some
languages realize it less than others. :-)

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BrendanEich
Zing!

Yes, JS sucks. It's also getting less sucky, because it won't go away. Kind of
obvious at this point.

