# Falcon - powering innovation **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [April 11, 2009, 3:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/falcon-powering-innovation/165287 "2009-04-11T15:20:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/cc9497/32.png) [@Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kless)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2009, 3:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/falcon-powering-innovation/165287/1 "2009-04-11T15:20:48Z")
If anybody is interesed in new technologies, you’ll love this new language called Falcon [1], which has been open sourced ago little time. Falcon is a scripting engine ready to empower mission-critical multithreaded applications. It provides six integrated programming paradigms: procedural, object oriented, prototype oriented, functional, tabular and message oriented. You use what you prefer. To know more about its design, read the interview to the Falcon author that has published ComputerWorld Australia [2]. [1] [http://www.falconpl.org/](http://www.falconpl.org/) [2] [IT news, careers, business technology, reviews | Computerworld](http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/298655/-z_programming_languages_falcon?fp=2&fpid=) ---
**Author:** ![Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/cc9497/32.png) [@Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kless)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2009, 3:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/falcon-powering-innovation/165287/2 "2009-04-11T15:49:04Z")
On the first page I was greated withy this example: > “Hello world!” …which would suggest it uses the greater then sign as a printf. So then what if I write something like this: if a \> some\_function() Am I say: “if (a) printf(some\_function())” or is this just all the condition line, such as: “if (a \> some\_function())”. Code syntactic sugar is nice to have, but not when I welcome in all sorts of cases of ambiguity. ---
**Author:** ![Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/cc9497/32.png) [@Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kless)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2009, 6:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/falcon-powering-innovation/165287/3 "2009-04-11T18:20:25Z")
To compile it one needs cmake. Unfortunately I was not able to build it. The Io Language has a similar problem - I can not compile it. I am sorry to say, but this is frustrating for me. Python, Ruby and Perl all compile here from source for me without ANY problem. I think new languages should put big emphasis to try to stay on par with the existing scripting languages. Maybe Falcon is better than i.e. python, but if I am too stupid to compile it, whereas ruby python and perl all work nicely (as opposed to compiling Falcon or Io), then I just stick to what gives me less problems. That being said, Falcon seems to have some really cool ideas. Who knows, maybe one day ruby learns from falcon 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/cc9497/32.png) [@Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kless)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2009, 12:23pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/falcon-powering-innovation/165287/4 "2009-04-16T12:23:28Z")
> ``` > attr_accessor #{property} > end > > ``` > > } > end Actually, this is a hack already. (Warning, the parameter order is 1.9 only). def self.makeClassWithProp(name, superclass = Object, property) c = Class.new(superclass) { attr\_accessor property } const\_set(name, c) end Is a nice and clean way to get that working. This generates a Subclass to the Module/Class this Method is defined in. Regards, Florian – Florian G. smtp: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid jabber: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid gpg: 533148E2 ---
**Author:** ![Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/cc9497/32.png) [@Kless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kless)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2009, 6:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/falcon-powering-innovation/165287/5 "2009-04-11T18:40:55Z")
Kless wrote: > that has published ComputerWorld Australia [2]. > Nice language (I like all new languages :). Please don’t read any of my > words as criticism. The Falcon Facts Table [1](http://www.falconpl.org/index.ftd?page_id=facts) is not 100% right about Ruby. - Document Template: There was eruby in the past (maybe it still exists) that was a binary. Other than that, “Document Templating” can be emulated by this one-liner: And then, I don’t think this is an important fact and should definitively not be built into the language itself. - Multithreading: Ruby 1.8 had portable multithreading (it even worked under DOS a decade ago). Ruby 1.9 has native OS threads, which are a lot more scalable than green threads of Ruby 1.8. But basically the same applies as for Python. I guess JRuby is a lot more scalable in this regard. - Embeddability: You can embed Ruby into a C application in 10 lines of code. But usually you write wrappers of a C library and call it from Ruby. What you can’t do is to embed multiple instances of Ruby into your application (you can do that with Rubinius). - C Dynamic Library Interface: Ruby ships with “dl”, with which you can access dynamic libraries. - Compile time metaprogramming: I don’t see a huge difference to Ruby’s metaprogramming here. You can do exactly the same with evaluating strings, e.g. - Procedural programming: Well, methods are very similar to procedures. If you write methods in the toplevel (without a class declaration), they are part of class Object. I don’t see a huge difference to procedures 🙂 - Functional Programming: I’d give Python here a clear “yes”, as Python’s methods are actually functions. You can definitively pass other functions as parameters to functions in Python. In Ruby, there are also functions (“blocks”) that you can pass to methods. So I’d give Ruby at least a partial here and Python a clear “yes”. - Prototype-oriented: Ruby has singleton methods. a = Array.new def a.new\_method “hallo” end p a.new\_method # =\> “hallo” Array.new.new\_method #=\> method missing - Direct binary data access: Both Python and Ruby have libraries that ship by default that deal with this. In Ruby this is done by methods #pack and #unpack. - Virtual filesystem: There is open-uri, a library which provides kind-of virtual filesystem: * * * IMHO, Falcon mixes too many things into one language, without having a clear advantage over languages like Python or Ruby (at least I haven’t seen a clear feature that Python or Ruby doesn’t have). I like Ruby because of it’s simplicity and well-thought-out underlying model (everything is an object), and not to forget the principle of (matz’s) least suprise in the core libraries. Having too many concepts in a language is not always a good thing. Regards, Michael