On Sat, Dec 09, 2023 at 08:26:57PM +0000, Peter Broadbery wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 at 16:47, Ralf Hemmecke <r...@hemmecke.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Peter,
> >
> > > I think the reference to 'Aldor folks' above is optimistic - I'd like
> > > to get a few more people helping with development (this is an
> > > optimistic plea for interested parties, to get involved btw).
> >
> > Yes, would be supergood to have more developers, but it's somewhat of a
> > hen-egg-problem. Nobody can get interested in Aldor if he/she doesn't
> > know about the advantages of Aldor. I'm afraid that FriCAS will not help
> > much. I try to have an eye on the generation of libfricas.al so that
> > Aldor is at least usable together with FriCAS, but what is needed is a
> > kind of killer application that shows why Aldor is good. Now many people
> > jump on the Julia train simply because they see faster development
> > there. It's hard to say how one can best advertise Aldor to other
> > compiler developers.
> >
>
> Yes - it is hard to sell without a strong application; unfortunately I
> don't have a strong sense of what a
> killer application would look like. I suspect that the algebra
> library contains several
> good starting points for anyone wishing to push it further.
I am affraid that it works differently: you or somebody else have
a cool idea and use Aldor to implement it. There are some
necessery (but certainly not sufficient) condition for this.
First, Aldor must be good language to solve given problem.
Now, in abstract Aldor language is good. But when doing something
new there is a lot of experimentation and for this it matters
how smooth is developement cycle. First, one needs fast compilation
and interactive testing. Clear compiler diagnostics help.
IDE and debugger can make a difference.
Next, there is need for libraries. For math Aldor library is
resonable start, but is limited. FriCAS library gives more
coverage, so symbolic math is resonably covered. But symbolic
math is rather narrow programming domain and I think that
Aldor alone here have little chance. In more general context
people want database access, web framework, GUI toolkit etc.
For heavy computations people want multithreading and there
are tricky issues of parallel garbage collection.
I am not saying that language must have all of the above,
but need enough for a succesful application.
Also, for other people to join Aldor must be easy to build
and work on their machines. Which means either being very
careful to use portable constructs or have a build/test
farm of machines (possibly virtual) running several different
configurations.
In different spirit: fact that Aldor is not written in Aldor
also is a disadvantage. You need a person that is comfortable
writing C and likes Aldor, and persons liking Aldor are
unlikely to want to develop in C. Also, given that Aldor
developers used C, Aldor users may have doubts about suitablity
of Aldor for serious projects. Of course, it is probably too
late to change this...
--
Waldek Hebisch
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