"spir" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On 02/09/2011 02:01 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> "Walter Bright"<[email protected]> wrote in message >> news:[email protected]... >>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fdqdn/google_go_just_got_major_win32_treats_now/c1f62a0 >> >> You'd think that things like JS, Haskell, LISP and Java circa v1.2 would >> have taught people that extreme simplicity/orthogonality is a stupid way >> to >> design a language that's intended to be used in the real world. But >> people >> keep flocking to that silver bullet anyway. > > Yop! this said, I recently read (no pointer, sorry) about a possibly > interesting third way: making the core language as close to orthogonal as > possible w/o making the rest difficult, then build compromises as sugar > layers around (syntactic & semantic). > This may be, actually, more or less close to how some actual languages are > actually constructed; but I find that making this principle intentonal and > intentional totally changes the whole approach. Also think this well fits > the design of PL with a main/core paradigm/style (not so for D, probably). >
Yea, that seems to be the direction that post-v1.2 Java ended up taking. Still too little, too late, IMO, at least in the case of Java, but it may not necessarily be a bad idea. Although I do like the inverse approach that D ended up taking: Don't bother with simplicity/orthogonality at first, just get important features in. *Then* refactor the internals to shuffle the complexity into the std lib and simplify the core language. (And, of course, use lowerings whenever appropriate.) Funny though, right after I posted "You'd think that things like JS...", the obvious devil's-advocate counter-argument occurred to me: "You'd think that things like C++ and Algol would have taught people that complex languages are a stupid way to go." Oh well.
