Simon Cozens
Tue, 20 Feb 2001 10:40:17 -0800
On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 12:10:53PM -0600, Garrett Goebel wrote: > o Will experiences from Ruby be assimilated back into Perl? > > o What impact will C# and .NET have on Perl 6? Don't forget > Larry's required reading recommendation: > http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.html > > o Where will the foreign function interface be heading? The task and the art of language design is - I hate to use the word "holistic", but, well - holistic. It's like, oh, I don't know, writing music. You can't do it in a vacuum - everything you hear influences you. Everything feeds in - whether it was what you thought sucked about your last piece, or what worked about your last piece, or interesting techniques in something you've just heard, or maybe just the style and "feeling" of a few composers you've been listening to recently. Culture matters a *lot*. If I spent a load of time in Canadia, I'd probably start picking up a few Canadian idioms in my own speech. In that case of speech, it's hard to avoid them; for language design, they only become explicit by design. But they're still implicit influences. So I think it's impossible that interesting things about Ruby, C#, Japanese, and everything else out there would *not* be *an influence* to some degree. Language design is more fun than writing music because you can generalise the good parts of your influences - if I ripped off one of Michael Nyman's vocal lines, I'd be a plagiarist, but if I could find a way of ripping off the *potential* to create vocal lines like his, then I've done something far more valuable and interesting. (aside: Python is Mahler. Discuss.) So while we may not end up doing things the way Ruby or Python does them, we'll certainly have the ability to some something like them. Or maybe we won't. There has to be some point to having other languages around, after all. :) -- What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad. - Dave Barry