6 ms·

The next big language

65 points by newgame 16y ago

binarymax 16y ago
JavaScript is going to get much bigger. My money is on that especially with node.js and html5 in the game. I also noticed F# was not even mentioned, purposefully or mistakenly?
- twymer 16y ago
  I think the problem with F# is going to be competition from Clojure (which also runs on the .NET platform).
  - evilthinker 16y ago
    I don't think that there will be that many competition, the ML folks that really want to try something new will go to F#, the Lisp folks will go to Clojure. Still there aren't that many reasons to abandon Common Lisp for Clojure(specially with Oracle controlling the JVM), or ML for F#(for Haskell maybe, but Haskell has its problems too).
    - twymer 16y ago
      The only existing reason is that the two of them run on modern, enterprise accepted platforms. If you're hacking your personal projects in Lisp, you have no reason to switch. If you want to sling some Lisp/ML at work, well Clojure of F# are likely to be your only options.
      - _delirium 16y ago
        In that setting, I think F# has an advantage currently, since it's an officially supported/blessed language on Visual Studio and .NET.
        frou_dh 16y ago
        You could say Clojure is a Java library. It's a single JAR file.
        _delirium 16y ago
        To ship it, yes, but there's the compiler, too. With F#, if your organization uses the latest Visual Studio, you're good; but if your shop uses a typical Java IDE setup, anyone who wants to build your project has to do extra work beyond the standard environment (e.g. installing Clojure's Eclipse or NetBeans plugins, with extra fun if you depend on Clojure libs that use Leiningen).
- fauigerzigerk 16y ago
  JavaScript is definately a candidate, but I don't think it's going to be node.js. Doing all IO asynchronously strikes me as very premature optimization. I prefer the way Go or Erlang deal with these scaling issues.
  - beagle3 16y ago
    Funny you should consider async i/o to be premature optimization. To me it looks like the only reasonable way to build a non-trivial system. Threads on the other hand, are the often the wrong optimisation -- processes are the right one.
    - fauigerzigerk 16y ago
      The distinction of threads v processes is not something that necessarily influences the logic of our code. If I want to say a() b() c() I can do that with a thread or a process and it doesn't matter what a, b or c actually do. However, with the "IO must be asyc" stipulation, I have to know whether any of those functions is an IO call, because if it is, I have to write it in a completely different way, even if the logic I need is synchronous. I don't like that kind of interference with my logic.
      - beagle3 16y ago
        Well, with very high probability, your logic is broken in the face of errors / malicious users then. Node's async structure is just taking the async model of the web one step further, into processing the same request asynchronously if you need to wait for something else. You might be master of doing this logic right, but I've audited tens (perhaps hundreds) of systems, and all the synchronous ones got it wrong. (Disclaimer: I've never worked with Node. But I've been writing async servers in C and Python since 1999).
  - noglorp 16y ago
    Node.js has synchronous, blocking IO options along with all the async ones. Just append Sync to the end wherever it makes sense.
- gaius 16y ago
  There was a post linked here a couple of days ago where JWZ was bemoaning the lack of #!/usr/bin/javascript - and it's still not possible to use JS as a general purpose language a la Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. I know it has all sorts of negative stereotypes, but the combination of JavaScript and PHP is the new Visual Basic - something that will let someone who isn't an expert quickly make a useful GUI application. And it won't go anywhere VB didn't go.
  - chewbranca 16y ago
    Yeah but #!/usr/bin/node does work. I've used some node.js command line scripts, and it works decently well. Some people praise Node.js for general purpose command line scripts. Personally, I find Ruby easier to use for command line utilities and scripts.
    - gaius 16y ago
      It's more than that - if you could assume #!/usr/bin/javascript (Or c:\windows\system32\javascript.exe) on any machine that had Netscape installed, then you'd have a viable ecosystem. The reason Perl became popular was not because it was the "best" language for CGI scripts but because you could assume that the sysadmin had already installed it for his own use. Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild".
      - grayrest 16y ago
        > Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild". Given that it really only hit the public consciousness last November or so, that's more or less expected. What makes people so bullish is that the number of JS developers isn't going to decrease any time soon. It is, however, a pretty awful shell scripting environment and I don't know who would prefer it to Ruby. I say this despite writing a build system for it this weekend to drop dependencies on Ruby and Java. Coffeescript improves things but it's still pretty raw.
- newgame 16y ago
  I'd like to add that I already count Javascript as a "big language" as I wrote: As we all know C, C++, C# and Java are these big mainstream languages of today with “recent” additions Python, Ruby, Javascript and, especially in the Apple world, Objective-C. I totally agree with you that Javascript is going to get much bigger but to me it is already big so it doesn't even need to contend against the other languages in my blog post ;).
melling 16y ago
Imagine that you want to rewrite OpenOffice from scratch. What language would you use? That should be the next big language.
- gordonguthrie 16y ago
  That will be Erlang then :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794543
- Seth_Kriticos 16y ago
  Not a bad idea, I was skimming around the LibreOffice sources recently and it really could use a big scrapping everything and rewriting it. The best language choice would be C, or maybe C++/Qt for portability. Not that it will happen, but hopefully the LO devs will still clean up the codebase a bit. Ps. The language actually does not matter that much. Much more important is a clean, scalable and fast design.
- arethuza 16y ago
  If you were going to do that I think choice of language would be the least of your worries! Having said that, I would probably go with a set of low level modules/services, probably written in C or C++, held together with JavaScript.
twymer 16y ago
I was a little surprised with D being listed as one of the main contenders. I guess Clojure and Go were obvious suggestions. Go has the backing of Google and aims to be everything we want (fun/ease of Python, speed of C++) and Clojure is the ancient popular Lisp with a modern twist. I guess I would have expected Javascript and Groovy to be included. Though I might be biased, I worked with a client using Groovy and in that short time saw that there was a lot of use in the (local) industry in it.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  I was a little surprised with D being listed as one of the main contenders. I guess Clojure and Go were obvious suggestions. Near the end he references some mailing list debate, then comments that Go emphasizes simplicity while D emphasizes features, therefore D will win, because to him, language features rock. To me, this idea reveals that much of his "reasoning" is this prejudice. Nothing to see here. Move on!
- gaius 16y ago
  D is just a sideshow. The community is too wracked with infighting over Tango vs Phobos. There aren't going to be a viable platform and ecosystem anytime soon. Pity. The "real work" crowd has, well, real work to do, they - we - can't hang around forever.
ericb 16y ago
I don't really understand his justification for excluding Erlang. It IS a general purpose language, and I can't see it as any more niche than some of the obscure languages he includes (Clay?).
- hassy 16y ago
  No curly braces, no hashtables, awkward strings, doesn't look object-oriented. (This coming from someone whose favorite language is Erlang.)
  - ericb 16y ago
    All true, but that isn't his justification in the article. He skips Erlang by damning it as confined to a niche, like PHP. Edit: Reia would be worth discussing if those are major obstacles.
  - Zak 16y ago
    He gives consideration to Clojure, which makes only limited use of curly braces and explicitly rejects object-orientation as most of the world understands it.
johnnytee 16y ago
I think server side JavaScript is the future. One language to rule the web's front end and back end.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jpr 16y ago
  Would be consistent with the tendency of majority of programmers to select the crummiest possible language because some platform that necessitates its use fluked into popularity.
ohhmaagawd 16y ago
I'd love to see Mirah hit it big (statically typed Ruby on JVM). Dunno if it will tho: http://www.mirah.org/ http://www.mirah.org/
michaelchisari 16y ago
I had an idea the other day about being able to write client-side browser apps in Google Go. I found it very intriguing. My votes are for Go and Javascript. One has a 800lb gorilla behind it, and the other has a ton of momentum, and I agree with the other poster that the maturation of server-side Javascript and the ability to use one language on both ends is very appealing.
8ren 16y ago
New languages are carried on the backs of new platforms. eg: unix & c; web & javascript. To predict the next big language, predict the next big platform. The upcoming platforms are: smart phones & tablets; cloud computing & many-core. The cloud, being connected services, is largely language-agnostic, and many-core might end up being implemented by borrowing whatever works in the cloud. The needs of the above seem well-met by established languages, leaving little opportunity for new languages to emerge. What about the next big platform after the above? It's probably more than 10 years off, but Moore's law says smaller devices will come. If disruptive, they'll be attractive to new audiences, with different needs - perhaps along the lines of cochlear neural implants (already big business) or garage genetic-engineering. What languages do those guys happen to be using? They will be carried to success.
- newgame 16y ago
  Yes, you are absolutely right. In fact I had started a chapter about the "far future" where I wanted to elaborate more on the computer architecture change and its effect on programming languages. But I thought the scope would become too large. If you are interested I gathered some links about the "far future": * https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Jonathan-Edwards-Programming-Futures-and-Declarative-Objects/ https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Jonathan-Edwards-Pro... * http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4088 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4088 * http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4090 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4090
- lkrubner 16y ago
  The next big platform is multiple cores/multiple CPUs. The next big language is functional and helps deal with consistency across time and across CPUs. Therefore, the next big language is Clojure. Rich Hickey said it best: "If somebody hands you something mutable—let's say it has methods to get this, get that, and get the other attribute—can you walk through those and know you've seen a consistent object? The answer is you can't, and that's a problem of time. Because if there were no other actors in the world, and if time wasn't passing between when you looked at the first, second, and third attribute, you would have no problems. But because nothing is captured of the aggregate value at a point in time, you have to spend time to look at the pieces. And while that time is elapsing, someone else could be changing it. So you won't necessarily see something consistent. For example, take a mutable Date class that has year, month, and day. To me, changing a date is like trying to change 42 into 43. That's not something we should be doing, but we think we can, because the architecture of classes is such that we could make a Date object that has mutable year, month, and day. Say it was March 31, 2009, and somebody wanted to make it February 12, 2009. If they changed the month first there would be, at some point in time, February 31, 2009, which is not a valid date. That's not actually a problem of shared state as much as it is a problem of time. The problem is we've taken a date, which should be just as immutable as 42 is, and we've turned it into something with multiple independent pieces. And then we don't have a model for the differences in time of the person who wants to read that state and the person who wants to change it." http://www.artima.com/articles/hickey_on_time.html http://www.artima.com/articles/hickey_on_time.html
r0sebush 16y ago
Erlang.
robryan 16y ago
Don't want to get into a language merits argument, but how can you consider the most widely used language on the web niche?
- frou_dh 16y ago
  PHP? Computing is more than web pages. I'm rooting for Clojure. Rich Hickey's presentations detailing his rationales make sense and are quite inspiring.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    And Clojure makes a lot of sense in many-core scenarios.
- newgame 16y ago
  What I meant by that is that PHP is admittedly used widely on the web but almost nonexistent in other "niches" like game programming, kernel programming, artificial intelligence, high performance computing etc. I'm thinking of the ecological meaning of the word niche not the meaning of "something small".
- tszming 16y ago
  Who can say Web is niche market? Also, I feel sick all the time when people telling me X is a new general purpose programming language that will solve all the problems. People should be more open minded, pick the right tool for the job.
csomar 16y ago
My sens tell me "JavaScript". The rise of the Web (especially Web applications), HTML5, Tablets and mobile applications, Server Side JS... I think JavaScript can make a big move. Learn one language and use it in anything you'll even dream of. With its' flexibility, extend the language to support any feature you'd like. Make it Object Oriented, Prototypal, Procedural, your own...
edsrzf 16y ago
I find it interesting that he says Go's syntax is ugly, but that Clay programs look so good and readable. The two languages have a very similar basic syntax, and some of the Go's differences are an improvement in my book: no semi-colons, fewer parentheses.
hedgie 16y ago
We don't pick our tools to fit the job? The next big language will be determined by the needs of the largest computer user groups. The particular needs of these groups will determine the languages that eventually reach critical mass. Using 5 universal criteria that characterize good programming languages is the wrong approach. For example, in safety critical systems his metric of conciseness is worthless. Ada may sometimes take more lines of code to accomplish a specific task than C but the requirements of safety critical platforms demand the extra effort and cost. The metric is worthless because it isn't picked to coincide with the needs of the users. No one cares that the strong typing or other features in Ada can slow down coding and annoy programmers because this practice eliminates many bugs in the final product. The needs of the end-user for bug free code outweigh their needs to ship quickly and please developers. It is a tool used for a specific job that it handles quite well. Evaluating a programming language with 5 universal metrics ignores that they are tools used to solve the problems of a particular group of users. If you want to figure out what the next big language will be ask what platform will have the most users in the near future and what the needs of those users are. The languages that meet them best are the top choices.
aufreak3 16y ago
No mention of Arc here? Its the language behind HN after all :)
rbanffy 16y ago
"compile-time correctness"?! All a compiler can say is that it compiles. It has no idea if the program does what you want.
- evilthinker 16y ago
  Still that is more than one can say about most dynamic languages.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    And how much this "more" really means? All it says is that the program pieces fit together. The small benefit of knowing my potentially wrong program got the types of whatever is being passed around right gives me very little comfort when I think about the flexibility I lose by using statically typed languages.
mmphosis 16y ago
I think the next big language will actually be a small language.
tszming 16y ago
Seem many people here have high expectations on JavaScript, cool! :) Also, be sure to check out the JavaScript's kid brother - coffee-script http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
woadwarrior01 16y ago
The Clay mention makes me really happy. Years ago, I was a part of the small team that was working on its first incarnation, though its a completely different language now and I'm sure its been through half a dozen rewrites since then.
rbarooah 16y ago
Strange that nobody's mentioned scala yet. Clearly it has its detractors, it seems like a credible candidate to displace Java. It also has more traction than a number of these languages, and more importantly there's a huge number of java based developers and organizations who are under pressure to improve productivity and can adopt it incrementally. It seems to me to have fewer barriers to becoming a major language than most of the other contenders.
- gclaramunt 16y ago
  Indeed, specially with the pretty high profile companies using it: LinkedIn, Twitter, FourSquare.
skybrian 16y ago
I think a new language could win by being more portable. A compiler that targets Intel and ARM is no longer interesting. But a nice language with a compiler that can create libraries usable in JavaScript apps, iPhone apps, Android apps, and App Engine apps would be very interesting.

65 points by newgame 16y ago

JavaScript is going to get much bigger. My money is on that especially with node.js and html5 in the game. I also noticed F# was not even mentioned, purposefully or mistakenly?

twymer 16y ago
I think the problem with F# is going to be competition from Clojure (which also runs on the .NET platform).
- evilthinker 16y ago
  I don't think that there will be that many competition, the ML folks that really want to try something new will go to F#, the Lisp folks will go to Clojure. Still there aren't that many reasons to abandon Common Lisp for Clojure(specially with Oracle controlling the JVM), or ML for F#(for Haskell maybe, but Haskell has its problems too).
  - twymer 16y ago
    The only existing reason is that the two of them run on modern, enterprise accepted platforms. If you're hacking your personal projects in Lisp, you have no reason to switch. If you want to sling some Lisp/ML at work, well Clojure of F# are likely to be your only options.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      In that setting, I think F# has an advantage currently, since it's an officially supported/blessed language on Visual Studio and .NET.
      - frou_dh 16y ago
        You could say Clojure is a Java library. It's a single JAR file.
        _delirium 16y ago
        To ship it, yes, but there's the compiler, too. With F#, if your organization uses the latest Visual Studio, you're good; but if your shop uses a typical Java IDE setup, anyone who wants to build your project has to do extra work beyond the standard environment (e.g. installing Clojure's Eclipse or NetBeans plugins, with extra fun if you depend on Clojure libs that use Leiningen).
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
JavaScript is definately a candidate, but I don't think it's going to be node.js. Doing all IO asynchronously strikes me as very premature optimization. I prefer the way Go or Erlang deal with these scaling issues.
- beagle3 16y ago
  Funny you should consider async i/o to be premature optimization. To me it looks like the only reasonable way to build a non-trivial system. Threads on the other hand, are the often the wrong optimisation -- processes are the right one.
  - fauigerzigerk 16y ago
    The distinction of threads v processes is not something that necessarily influences the logic of our code. If I want to say a() b() c() I can do that with a thread or a process and it doesn't matter what a, b or c actually do. However, with the "IO must be asyc" stipulation, I have to know whether any of those functions is an IO call, because if it is, I have to write it in a completely different way, even if the logic I need is synchronous. I don't like that kind of interference with my logic.
    - beagle3 16y ago
      Well, with very high probability, your logic is broken in the face of errors / malicious users then. Node's async structure is just taking the async model of the web one step further, into processing the same request asynchronously if you need to wait for something else. You might be master of doing this logic right, but I've audited tens (perhaps hundreds) of systems, and all the synchronous ones got it wrong. (Disclaimer: I've never worked with Node. But I've been writing async servers in C and Python since 1999).
- noglorp 16y ago
  Node.js has synchronous, blocking IO options along with all the async ones. Just append Sync to the end wherever it makes sense.
gaius 16y ago
There was a post linked here a couple of days ago where JWZ was bemoaning the lack of #!/usr/bin/javascript - and it's still not possible to use JS as a general purpose language a la Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. I know it has all sorts of negative stereotypes, but the combination of JavaScript and PHP is the new Visual Basic - something that will let someone who isn't an expert quickly make a useful GUI application. And it won't go anywhere VB didn't go.
- chewbranca 16y ago
  Yeah but #!/usr/bin/node does work. I've used some node.js command line scripts, and it works decently well. Some people praise Node.js for general purpose command line scripts. Personally, I find Ruby easier to use for command line utilities and scripts.
  - gaius 16y ago
    It's more than that - if you could assume #!/usr/bin/javascript (Or c:\windows\system32\javascript.exe) on any machine that had Netscape installed, then you'd have a viable ecosystem. The reason Perl became popular was not because it was the "best" language for CGI scripts but because you could assume that the sysadmin had already installed it for his own use. Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild".
    - grayrest 16y ago
      > Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild". Given that it really only hit the public consciousness last November or so, that's more or less expected. What makes people so bullish is that the number of JS developers isn't going to decrease any time soon. It is, however, a pretty awful shell scripting environment and I don't know who would prefer it to Ruby. I say this despite writing a build system for it this weekend to drop dependencies on Ruby and Java. Coffeescript improves things but it's still pretty raw.
newgame 16y ago
I'd like to add that I already count Javascript as a "big language" as I wrote: As we all know C, C++, C# and Java are these big mainstream languages of today with “recent” additions Python, Ruby, Javascript and, especially in the Apple world, Objective-C. I totally agree with you that Javascript is going to get much bigger but to me it is already big so it doesn't even need to contend against the other languages in my blog post ;).

melling 16y ago

Imagine that you want to rewrite OpenOffice from scratch. What language would you use? That should be the next big language.

gordonguthrie 16y ago
That will be Erlang then :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1794543
Seth_Kriticos 16y ago
Not a bad idea, I was skimming around the LibreOffice sources recently and it really could use a big scrapping everything and rewriting it. The best language choice would be C, or maybe C++/Qt for portability. Not that it will happen, but hopefully the LO devs will still clean up the codebase a bit. Ps. The language actually does not matter that much. Much more important is a clean, scalable and fast design.
arethuza 16y ago
If you were going to do that I think choice of language would be the least of your worries! Having said that, I would probably go with a set of low level modules/services, probably written in C or C++, held together with JavaScript.

twymer 16y ago

I was a little surprised with D being listed as one of the main contenders. I guess Clojure and Go were obvious suggestions. Go has the backing of Google and aims to be everything we want (fun/ease of Python, speed of C++) and Clojure is the ancient popular Lisp with a modern twist. I guess I would have expected Javascript and Groovy to be included. Though I might be biased, I worked with a client using Groovy and in that short time saw that there was a lot of use in the (local) industry in it.

stcredzero 16y ago
I was a little surprised with D being listed as one of the main contenders. I guess Clojure and Go were obvious suggestions. Near the end he references some mailing list debate, then comments that Go emphasizes simplicity while D emphasizes features, therefore D will win, because to him, language features rock. To me, this idea reveals that much of his "reasoning" is this prejudice. Nothing to see here. Move on!
gaius 16y ago
D is just a sideshow. The community is too wracked with infighting over Tango vs Phobos. There aren't going to be a viable platform and ecosystem anytime soon. Pity. The "real work" crowd has, well, real work to do, they - we - can't hang around forever.

ericb 16y ago

I don't really understand his justification for excluding Erlang. It IS a general purpose language, and I can't see it as any more niche than some of the obscure languages he includes (Clay?).

hassy 16y ago
No curly braces, no hashtables, awkward strings, doesn't look object-oriented. (This coming from someone whose favorite language is Erlang.)
- ericb 16y ago
  All true, but that isn't his justification in the article. He skips Erlang by damning it as confined to a niche, like PHP. Edit: Reia would be worth discussing if those are major obstacles.
- Zak 16y ago
  He gives consideration to Clojure, which makes only limited use of curly braces and explicitly rejects object-orientation as most of the world understands it.

johnnytee 16y ago

I think server side JavaScript is the future. One language to rule the web's front end and back end.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jpr 16y ago
Would be consistent with the tendency of majority of programmers to select the crummiest possible language because some platform that necessitates its use fluked into popularity.

ohhmaagawd 16y ago

I'd love to see Mirah hit it big (statically typed Ruby on JVM). Dunno if it will tho: http://www.mirah.org/ http://www.mirah.org/

michaelchisari 16y ago

I had an idea the other day about being able to write client-side browser apps in Google Go. I found it very intriguing. My votes are for Go and Javascript. One has a 800lb gorilla behind it, and the other has a ton of momentum, and I agree with the other poster that the maturation of server-side Javascript and the ability to use one language on both ends is very appealing.

8ren 16y ago

New languages are carried on the backs of new platforms. eg: unix & c; web & javascript. To predict the next big language, predict the next big platform. The upcoming platforms are: smart phones & tablets; cloud computing & many-core. The cloud, being connected services, is largely language-agnostic, and many-core might end up being implemented by borrowing whatever works in the cloud. The needs of the above seem well-met by established languages, leaving little opportunity for new languages to emerge. What about the next big platform after the above? It's probably more than 10 years off, but Moore's law says smaller devices will come. If disruptive, they'll be attractive to new audiences, with different needs - perhaps along the lines of cochlear neural implants (already big business) or garage genetic-engineering. What languages do those guys happen to be using? They will be carried to success.

newgame 16y ago
Yes, you are absolutely right. In fact I had started a chapter about the "far future" where I wanted to elaborate more on the computer architecture change and its effect on programming languages. But I thought the scope would become too large. If you are interested I gathered some links about the "far future": * https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Jonathan-Edwards-Programming-Futures-and-Declarative-Objects/ https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Jonathan-Edwards-Pro... * http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4088 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4088 * http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4090 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4090
lkrubner 16y ago
The next big platform is multiple cores/multiple CPUs. The next big language is functional and helps deal with consistency across time and across CPUs. Therefore, the next big language is Clojure. Rich Hickey said it best: "If somebody hands you something mutable—let's say it has methods to get this, get that, and get the other attribute—can you walk through those and know you've seen a consistent object? The answer is you can't, and that's a problem of time. Because if there were no other actors in the world, and if time wasn't passing between when you looked at the first, second, and third attribute, you would have no problems. But because nothing is captured of the aggregate value at a point in time, you have to spend time to look at the pieces. And while that time is elapsing, someone else could be changing it. So you won't necessarily see something consistent. For example, take a mutable Date class that has year, month, and day. To me, changing a date is like trying to change 42 into 43. That's not something we should be doing, but we think we can, because the architecture of classes is such that we could make a Date object that has mutable year, month, and day. Say it was March 31, 2009, and somebody wanted to make it February 12, 2009. If they changed the month first there would be, at some point in time, February 31, 2009, which is not a valid date. That's not actually a problem of shared state as much as it is a problem of time. The problem is we've taken a date, which should be just as immutable as 42 is, and we've turned it into something with multiple independent pieces. And then we don't have a model for the differences in time of the person who wants to read that state and the person who wants to change it." http://www.artima.com/articles/hickey_on_time.html http://www.artima.com/articles/hickey_on_time.html

r0sebush 16y ago

Erlang.

robryan 16y ago

Don't want to get into a language merits argument, but how can you consider the most widely used language on the web niche?

frou_dh 16y ago
PHP? Computing is more than web pages. I'm rooting for Clojure. Rich Hickey's presentations detailing his rationales make sense and are quite inspiring.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  And Clojure makes a lot of sense in many-core scenarios.
newgame 16y ago
What I meant by that is that PHP is admittedly used widely on the web but almost nonexistent in other "niches" like game programming, kernel programming, artificial intelligence, high performance computing etc. I'm thinking of the ecological meaning of the word niche not the meaning of "something small".
tszming 16y ago
Who can say Web is niche market? Also, I feel sick all the time when people telling me X is a new general purpose programming language that will solve all the problems. People should be more open minded, pick the right tool for the job.

csomar 16y ago

My sens tell me "JavaScript". The rise of the Web (especially Web applications), HTML5, Tablets and mobile applications, Server Side JS... I think JavaScript can make a big move. Learn one language and use it in anything you'll even dream of. With its' flexibility, extend the language to support any feature you'd like. Make it Object Oriented, Prototypal, Procedural, your own...

edsrzf 16y ago

I find it interesting that he says Go's syntax is ugly, but that Clay programs look so good and readable. The two languages have a very similar basic syntax, and some of the Go's differences are an improvement in my book: no semi-colons, fewer parentheses.

hedgie 16y ago

We don't pick our tools to fit the job? The next big language will be determined by the needs of the largest computer user groups. The particular needs of these groups will determine the languages that eventually reach critical mass. Using 5 universal criteria that characterize good programming languages is the wrong approach. For example, in safety critical systems his metric of conciseness is worthless. Ada may sometimes take more lines of code to accomplish a specific task than C but the requirements of safety critical platforms demand the extra effort and cost. The metric is worthless because it isn't picked to coincide with the needs of the users. No one cares that the strong typing or other features in Ada can slow down coding and annoy programmers because this practice eliminates many bugs in the final product. The needs of the end-user for bug free code outweigh their needs to ship quickly and please developers. It is a tool used for a specific job that it handles quite well. Evaluating a programming language with 5 universal metrics ignores that they are tools used to solve the problems of a particular group of users. If you want to figure out what the next big language will be ask what platform will have the most users in the near future and what the needs of those users are. The languages that meet them best are the top choices.

aufreak3 16y ago

No mention of Arc here? Its the language behind HN after all :)

rbanffy 16y ago

"compile-time correctness"?! All a compiler can say is that it compiles. It has no idea if the program does what you want.

evilthinker 16y ago
Still that is more than one can say about most dynamic languages.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  And how much this "more" really means? All it says is that the program pieces fit together. The small benefit of knowing my potentially wrong program got the types of whatever is being passed around right gives me very little comfort when I think about the flexibility I lose by using statically typed languages.

mmphosis 16y ago

I think the next big language will actually be a small language.

tszming 16y ago

Seem many people here have high expectations on JavaScript, cool! :) Also, be sure to check out the JavaScript's kid brother - coffee-script http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

woadwarrior01 16y ago

The Clay mention makes me really happy. Years ago, I was a part of the small team that was working on its first incarnation, though its a completely different language now and I'm sure its been through half a dozen rewrites since then.

rbarooah 16y ago

Strange that nobody's mentioned scala yet. Clearly it has its detractors, it seems like a credible candidate to displace Java. It also has more traction than a number of these languages, and more importantly there's a huge number of java based developers and organizations who are under pressure to improve productivity and can adopt it incrementally. It seems to me to have fewer barriers to becoming a major language than most of the other contenders.

gclaramunt 16y ago
Indeed, specially with the pretty high profile companies using it: LinkedIn, Twitter, FourSquare.

skybrian 16y ago

I think a new language could win by being more portable. A compiler that targets Intel and ARM is no longer interesting. But a nice language with a compiler that can create libraries usable in JavaScript apps, iPhone apps, Android apps, and App Engine apps would be very interesting.