So Robert Griesemer's points (features important for a new language to be successful) are: 1. clear target 2. solid implementation: language, libraries, and tools 3. market readiness 4. technological breakthrough 5. language features without competitors
I think Julia has all of 1 to 4. If I understand correctly, "language features without competitors" means that there is basically only one way to do a certain thing, not many, so that one doesn't have to make meaningless decisions when implementing an algorithm. I don't think Julia has this; instead of striving for minimalistic clarity only, Julia often seems to cater to the casual script programmer. There's another point that Robert makes on a different slide: he points to two tools, "gofmt" and "gofix", which helped make incompatible changes during development. Apparently, gofmt would change the syntax of existing code (e.g. remove trailing semicolons when they became optional), while gofix would change library APIs when incompatible changes were necessary. Julia has something similar to gofix in @Compat. A tool like gofix is missing -- wouldn't it be nice to be able to automatically convert the array / tuple / Union() / Uint places in the code? Naively, it looks like an easy task to slurp in the syntax tree of a Julia module, do a bit of pattern matching on it, and then dump the updated version. Maybe the automated high-quality human-readable formatting is the missing piece? One would think that this would come in handy at many other occasions as well, for example when debugging macros or generic functions... -erik On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 4:22 PM, Waldir Pimenta <waldir.pime...@gmail.com> wrote: > I just watched Robert Griesemer's GopherCon 2015 talk "The Evolution of Go > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ReKdcpNyQg>", and although I believe > the whole talk will be quite interesting to many in this list, I wondered > particularly if people here would agree with his assessment of "What makes > a programming language successful?", at 33:00 > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ReKdcpNyQg&t=33m02s> (slide #24 > <http://talks.golang.org/2015/gophercon-goevolution.slide#24>), and > whether those Julia ticks those boxes. > -- Erik Schnetter <schnet...@gmail.com> http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/eschnetter/
