3 ms·

This is a brilliant synopsis of the state of the art -- truly fantastic -- and yet the presentation concludes with, "The innovation won't happen because I can't

This is a brilliant synopsis of the state of the art -- truly fantastic -- and yet the presentation concludes with, "The innovation won't happen because I can't see where it will come from," and that's not entirely fair. Some areas he covers aren't exhaustively covered and what's missing is quite interesting. In other words, cheer up, there's more hope than what's shown here.

ghthor 9y ago
I think this is just a fustration with how little direct incentive there is from our economic system to fix the problem. The only chance of this paradigm existing is as a long shot project that is gifted to society, and the person that makes this gift has the slim chance that it doesn't succeed and all the effort is wasted.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  I found that the weakest part of the presentation. Kotlin and Ceylon both came out of corporate/industrial development. C#, JavaScript and Java continue to evolve entirely due to industrial funding. I agree that academia is not a great place to do PL research as all the other non-idea aspects of a successful PL don't get enough attention. But industry is doing OK at launching new languages. Perhaps he feels that's "incrementalism" but there's nothing wrong with making solid upgrades that aren't attempts at unicorn style magic cure-alls. It'd also help if we collectively got over our demand for our tools to always be open source. This has solid justifications behind it but it ensures that programming languages will always be spinoffs of other endeavours rather than having truly focused attention in their own right. When you take away the profit motive, you get stagnation, and that seems to be the main point of the presentation.
- david927 9y ago
  The only chance of this paradigm existing is as a long shot project I couldn't agree more but I also am not as pessimistic as he is at its chances of happening.
kd0amg 9y ago
The central claim isn't that innovation won't happen. It's that they won't go mainstream because nobody has both the means and motive for good tech transfer work.

ghthor 9y ago

I think this is just a fustration with how little direct incentive there is from our economic system to fix the problem. The only chance of this paradigm existing is as a long shot project that is gifted to society, and the person that makes this gift has the slim chance that it doesn't succeed and all the effort is wasted.

peoplewindow 9y ago
I found that the weakest part of the presentation. Kotlin and Ceylon both came out of corporate/industrial development. C#, JavaScript and Java continue to evolve entirely due to industrial funding. I agree that academia is not a great place to do PL research as all the other non-idea aspects of a successful PL don't get enough attention. But industry is doing OK at launching new languages. Perhaps he feels that's "incrementalism" but there's nothing wrong with making solid upgrades that aren't attempts at unicorn style magic cure-alls. It'd also help if we collectively got over our demand for our tools to always be open source. This has solid justifications behind it but it ensures that programming languages will always be spinoffs of other endeavours rather than having truly focused attention in their own right. When you take away the profit motive, you get stagnation, and that seems to be the main point of the presentation.
david927 9y ago
The only chance of this paradigm existing is as a long shot project I couldn't agree more but I also am not as pessimistic as he is at its chances of happening.

kd0amg 9y ago

The central claim isn't that innovation won't happen. It's that they won't go mainstream because nobody has both the means and motive for good tech transfer work.