On 02/03/2011 12:31 AM, bearophile wrote:
Walter:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fdqdn/google_go_just_got_major_win32_treats_now/c1f62a0
I have one comment about one thing said by bnolsen:
Simplicity + Orthogonality == win.<
I would like people who state such phrases to all spend 3 months (only)
programming exclusively in Oberon. From some point of view, it may probably be
considered the best language ever. Twice as expressive as Modula with half of
its features. It brings one the full power of imperative, structured,
object-oriented paradigms in a language /completely/ described in 13 (!) pages
of plain text.
It is a wonderful incarnation of the core any modern language should possess,
and how to do it properly. Language designers of the mainstream paradigm could
just start with Oberon as a clean, pure, safe, pedestal and just build on it.
For a full set of reasons, probably, Oberon has not had any success. Among them
(?) the obsession of those guys at ETH Zürich at /not/ considering practicality
as beeing of any worth, I guess ;-) This transforms programming in Oberon --a
potentially enthusiasmic experience at first sight-- into a battle of every
instant against irritating corners, annoying lacks, and against oneself to not
explode one's screen out of frustration.
What I want most is the language features to be implemented in a clean way,
with a clear semantics, with very few bad interactions with other language
features and very few pitfalls, and with a good clean syntax. If this is done
well enough, then I am able to learn and use hundreds of features too (and lots
of keywords).
Oberon is all what you ask for in the first sentence. On the other hand, just
/listing/ features D provides and Oberon does not would require pages.
Actually, its feature set is radically minuscule (and even more when compared
to its expressive power, I guess); this does not ensure cleanness, consistency
and orthogonality, indeed; but it may be impossible to achieve those qualities
as soon as features grow in number and, primarily, in diversity. I guess, in
fact, it is extremely difficult even for super simple toy languages. Successes
(from this point of view) like Oberon are rarissim as far as I know. (*)
Denis
(*) Even Pascal & Modula did not reach this point; precisely, Oberon abandoned
some of their features like enums and subrange types.
--
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vita es estrany
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