Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming language design?

On Friday, March 9, 2012 5:40:18 AM UTC+1, Cameron McInally wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:02 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com> wrote:
> > Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >> - And here's the first itchy point: there appears to be no correlation
> >> between the success of a programming language and its emergence in the
> form
> >> of someone's doctoral or post-doctoral work. This bothers me a lot, as an
> >> academic. It appears that deep thoughts, consistency, rigor and all other
> >> things we value as scientists aren't that important for mass adoption of
> >> programming languages.
> >
> > As a non-academic, I agree. None of those things matter very much to me
> > when it comes to actually getting stuff done. They are not bad things
> > to have, but they are not the things that matter.


When somebody writes about my project I can easily tell, if he/she is
from the academic or not-academic area. People who obviously only read
the FAQ and tell me that I do not understand the stuff, which is
already implemented, often turn out to be from the academic area.
Nitpicking from the FAQ, comparing egos and knowledge seems to be
easier than downloading and trying. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot
of respect for the academic area, since I studied myself and got a
Ph.D in computer science. People from the non-academic area often
already tried my project and ask for specific functionality like
unlimited precision integers, select for sockets, font support or how
to write a web application. Funny: People from the non-academic area
seem to explore new stuff, while academic people criticize me, because
I do not jump on an existing computer science fashion.


> This summarizes my empirical experiences well. Programming languages
> appear to grow organically, as if they were species. There are many
> dialects, from many tribes. Sometimes, a new language feature is
> created out of utility. If that feature is very useful, it spreads to
> different dialects. Later, theorists study the phenomena and define it
> formally. Sometimes, out of utility, a language feature is created by
> a tribe. Other tribes may not find this feature particularly useful.
> It becomes a regional colloquialism or dies off.


Totally agree. This is also my view. I see extensible programming
languages as part of the picture. Language evolution is supported by
extensible programming languages, because it is not necessary to
improve a compiler, just to get a feature from another language. The
problem is: Extensibility is not a feature which can be added
afterwards. A language must be designed from ground up to be
extensible.




Greetings Thomas Mertes


--
Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.

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