On Thursday, 14 July 2016 at 13:39:48 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Thursday, 14 July 2016 at 13:26:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
Such a language will never see the light of day.
Many such languages exist.
Like? I mean languages that can be used in the real world.
Certainly not Nim. It's not usable yet, it may change drastically
any time.
What makes a language attractive is that you can actually use
it - here and now.
What makes a language attractive is that it has system support
and provides solutions that save time. That's what languages
like TypeScript, Python, C#, Java, Swift and Go attractive.
... and they're all usable as in I can write software with them
right now.
I follow several languages that are very attractive, but that I
cannot use because they don't have system support. I am also
using languages that are less attractive than the alternatives
for the same reasons.
Of course, the first thing you ought to do is to look at
existing knowhow related to language design.
Which is what D did.
No, it did not build on existing knowhow in language design
theory, it was a fair reinterpretation of the C++ programming
model with a tiny bit of Pythonesque extensions.
Examples?
... which, in fairness, where never meant to be carefully
designed languages. Just convenient hacks for everyday tasks.
Perl and Php started as small and convenient scripting
languages, but they were predominantly evolved in an iterative
fashion for decades after that, and aggregated a lot of issues
related to exactly iterative evolution.
Yes, exactly, they were never meant to be big languages, just
scripting tools. Same happened to Python in a way. It should
never have left the lab and infected millions of people.
Both C++ and D shows clear signs of their abstraction
mechanisms not fitting well with the core language. Too many
mechanisms, not generic enough. And that happened because
significant changes came late in the process, after deployment.
You can say the same thing about Go and error-handling, it
sticks out like a sore thumb.
There's never _the_ perfect time to deploy a language, just like
there's never _the_ perfect time to buy a computer, the moment
you leave the shop it's out of date. You're dreaming of a
language that only exists in cloud cuckoo land and it will get
you nowhere. But of course, it's much easier to criticize the
players on the pitch from your comfy armchair than to actually go
onto the pitch and play yourself. No language ever gets it 100%
right, because there are conflicting demands, and it's trivial to
point out flaws that are bound to arise out of conflicting
demands.
