On 7/27/2011 1:52 PM, David Barbour wrote:
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 10:40 AM, BGB <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I think "fitness" and "merit" are some often misunderstood ideas.
People understand just fine that a solution of technical merit can
fail due to market forces, positioning, and fear of change. But they
don't need to like it.
the solutions which do best often tend to have the best sets of
tradeoffs and/or being well suited to a various niche, albeit
typically not being ideal in any single area.
Be careful! Correlation isn't causation. It is true that solutions
that succeed tend to have 'good' tradeoffs and/or are well suited to a
niche. *But so are a lot of solutions that fail.* Indeed, the failures
often have even better tradeoffs, because they are built with hindsight.
note that my definition of "fitness" also includes marketing forces and
economics.
for example, something can have be more "fit" because it has lots of
money invested into its marketing effort, ...
resistance to change is also an important factor in fitness, and any
ideal solution would also need to include this, as well as other
factors, such as name-recognition, or legal factors such as trademarks
and patent issues, ...
Inertia and circumstance easily trample a 'better' solution,
especially for a technology such as a programming language that grows
a whole ecosystem around it (IDEs, optimizers, integration with
applications, et cetera).
/Whether you intend it or not/, saying that the popular solution is
the 'best' one without even researching what has been attempted seems
ignorant, insulting, and prejudicial. Chances are, even if BGBScript
is an improvement on JavaScript in every way you or I can imagine, it
will fail. How would you feel if someone, who has never even looked up
your language, were to say: "JavaScript succeeds because it makes the
best tradeoffs."
in general, it shouldn't matter, since for the most part, BGBScript is
mostly a JavaScript superset (much like C++ is a C superset), and so
code written in a JS like subset will work in either one, and they are
not competing for the same domain anyways (BS being intended mostly for
app scripting, rather than web-servers or clients).
granted, this doesn't cover the case where the code depends on some of
my extensions...
otherwise, whether or not my language is adopted by other people is
really not of much significance.
many of the core extensions (apart from the FFI), were borrowed from
ActionScript 3, ...
however, with any luck, the ECMAScript Harmony working group will settle
on a design similar to my own (and hopefully not wildly incompatible),
in which case it will be more convenient for myself.
now, it is probably an issue if one considers ECMAScript, JavaScript,
ActionScript, ... to be distinct and competing languages.
or such...
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