Common Lisp vs. Fortran vs. JavaScript vs. Unlambda Comparison Chart

Fortran has been designed from the ground up for computationally intensive applications in science and engineering. Mature and battle-tested compilers and libraries allow you to write code that runs close to the metal, fast. Fortran is statically and strongly typed, which allows the compiler to catch many programming errors early on for you. This also allows the compiler to generate efficient binary code. Fortran is a relatively small language that is surprisingly easy to learn and use. Expressing most mathematical and arithmetic operations over large arrays is as simple as writing them as equations on a whiteboard. Fortran is a natively parallel programming language with intuitive array-like syntax to communicate data between CPUs. You can run almost the same code on a single CPU, on a shared-memory multicore system, or on a distributed-memory HPC or cloud-based system.

Unlambda is a programming language. Nothing remarkable there. The originality of Unlambda is that it stands as the unexpected intersection of two marginal families of languages. Functional programming languages, of which the canonical representative is Scheme (a Lisp dialect). This means that the basic object manipulated by the language (and indeed the only one as far as Unlambda is concerned) is the function. Rather, Unlambda uses a functional approach to programming: the only form of objects it manipulates are functions. Each function takes a function as an argument and returns a function. Apart from a binary “apply” operation, Unlambda provides several built-in functions (the most important ones being the K and S combinators). User-defined functions can be created, but not saved or named, because Unlambda does not have any variables.