You’d expect the longest and most costly phase in the life cycle of a software product to be the initial development of the system, when all those great features are first imagined and then created. In fact, the hardest part comes later, during the maintenance phase. That’s when programmers pay th
  • ttmrichter
    2·
    2 years ago

    Futhark is of interest as a future direction, chiefly as a supplementary language for sub-pieces of a larger, performance-intensive program. Note that its creators, however, explicitly state:

    Futhark is not intended to replace existing general-purpose languages. The intended use case is that Futhark is only used for relatively small but compute-intensive parts of an application.

    This is not a negative point, incidentally! I personally use a lot of languages in my work because I find it’s better to use a tool honed to near-perfection for a particular use case than it is to employ another tool that does something not quite the same with lower quality. I wish more programmers learned more tools so they stopped doing the programming equivalent of hammering nails with a large wrench.