On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 6:00 AM, BGB <[email protected]> wrote: > ... the more a language moves towards being > practical and useful, the more it will likely tend to resemble more > mainstream languages. which I suspect more work through a sort of long-term > distilation/refinement process, where useful features tend to be added > eventually, and non-useful features tend to be dropped, leading to > incremental improvement.
The fact that "successful" languages tends to resemble each other is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the things I enjoyed about the presentation was the reminder of the potential diversity in both meaning and mode of expression in computer languages. A healthy amount of diversity makes an eco-system more resilient. It seems to me that we were, until the last few years, converging on a dangerously unstable mono-culture of languages. I'm encouraged to see that we may be heading into a new period of expansion and experimentation, which I expect will eventually lead to another period of consolidation, as the cycle proceeds. Richard Gabriel had some interesting things to say about this http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternOfLanguageEvolution.pdf _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
