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> It seems like the article is mostly useful for inspiring research; that is, most of us aren't the target audience. As a group of professionals, it is highly
by antris 8y ago
> It seems like the article is mostly useful for inspiring research; that is, most of us aren't the target audience.
As a group of professionals, it is highly beneficial for us to be interested in these things. People who design languages and compilers do it largely on what is perceived as being demanded, and us as programmers are the ones that create the demand for new languages.
To put in other words, if programmers aren't aware of what's going wrong with our current languages, they cannot express their need for new languages. So, there's less incentive for researchers to produce new ways of programming computers. It is much more tempting to "please the masses" in a way that causes this local-maximum problem. It's much more interesting to research problems that translate into mainstream use than academic things that nobody actually uses.
- skybrian 8y agoI still think a research project (either academic or in industry) with a hardware component would be the best way to explore radical new processor architectures that are further away from C. - Hardware designers are conservative. They aren't likely to implement a different hardware architecture because "programmers demand it" (really?), unless there's existing research showing how it can be done and a compelling reason why customers will buy the chips. - As a hobbyist language designer, I'm still going to target something that exists and is popular: x86, JavaScript, wasm, C, or something like that. A low-level language targeting a platform that doesn't exist isn't all that appealing. But, someone might get some good papers out of doing the research.