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> Ed Borasky recently commented here at ReadWriteHack: "We flat out don't need any more programming languages! What we need is efficient implementations of the

by daeken 16y ago

> Ed Borasky recently commented here at ReadWriteHack: "We flat out don't need any more programming languages! What we need is efficient implementations of the ones we have now and IDEs / version control systems that enforce software engineering discipline." There was no need for assembly -- writing straight machine code worked. There was no need for C -- writing straight assembly worked. Etc, etc. There has never been a need for a new programming language, but new programming languages can make life easier, can save you time, can make new optimizations possible, etc. So he's right in that we flat out don't need any more programming languages, but that doesn't mean creating new programming languages is a bad idea, or something we shouldn't do.

quanticle 16y ago
It might be too soon to ask, but what distinguishes Rust from Google's Go or the D programming language? It seems to me that we've got three programming languages competing for the same niche.
- daeken 16y ago
  Not a whole lot, conceptually, it seems. The syntax feels very Nemerle-like to me, though, which is nice. Definitely something to play around with, if nothing else.
  - hamilton 16y ago
    Having seen early versions of Rust (I work at Mozilla) I can tell you that the syntax is the last thing they're even considering (though that may have changed over the past few months). Seems like Graydon wants to get the guts right first.
    - quanticle 16y ago
      That gets back to my question. What are Rust's advantages over Go or D?
- Semiapies 16y ago
  Not entirely sure what distinguishes them, but I'd rather have some competition in the niche than avoid defaulting to the first language that addresses the niche.
  - quanticle 16y ago
    That's true, but this whole effort smells like an exercise in wheel re-invention to me.
    - Semiapies 16y ago
      If you know what you're doing, that's a valid way to try to make better wheels.
- neilk 16y ago
  From https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/language-faq https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/language-faq : *Have you seen this Google language, Go? How does Rust compare?* Yes. Rust development was several years underway before Go launched, no direct inspiration. Though Pike’s previous languages in the Go family (Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo) were influential. Go adopted semantics (safety and memory model) that are quite unsatisfactory. - Shared mutable state. - Global GC. - Null pointers. - No RAII or destructors. - No type-parametric user code. There are a number of other fine coroutine / actor languages in development presently. It’s an area of focus across the PL community.
  - quanticle 16y ago
    Thanks for that. It wasn't clear from the linked article that Rust was started before Go. The overall impression that I got from TFA was that Rust is another instance of the garbage-collected system language fad.
    - ramchip 16y ago
      What are the other instances? Besides Go, I don't recall many languages that fit the bill. There's D, but it's not very new and certainly not a fad language.
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        And it's only garbage collected if you want it to be. (My friends are making an exokernel in D)
    - konad 16y ago
      I think the fact that Rust is older and yet Go has 1000s of active programmers is indicative of something. "Ship early, ship often" springs to mind. The Plan9 community has been working like that for years, almost every day an updated version is available (the distro cdrom is rebuilt every night) with bug fixes / improvements / new stuff.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - effn 16y ago
    Rust is not very functional at all. E.g. no lambda, no closures (yet).
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- effn 16y ago
  Compared to Go: * Rust does not have NULL!! * Rust has parametric polymorphism. * Rust has more predictable memory/cpu usage thanks to forgoing global GC for a novel memory management model based on stack allocation/RAII, immutability, isolated processes and reference counting. * Rust has a very Erlang-like model of handling failures. * Rust has typestate, which is an easy to use way of proving properties about your program statically, or check them dynamically via assertion. * Rust has no shared mutable state. Those are facts. My personal, more subjective, opinion is that Rust is a lot better thought out than either D or Go. If this niche is too crowded, I'd rather see them go and Rust win. :) But given that Rust lacks shared global GC, I guess you could say it's closer to C++
  - supersillyus 16y ago
    I think Rust is very interesting and quite exciting, but it's hard to evaluate in relation to other languages (for me, at least) because it is really really young. I've never seen a useful program written in Rust. All of the features sound really good in theory, but I've never used a similar language, so I don't have a sense for how these features work in practice. Actually, anybody have a link to some non-trivial Rust code?
    - effn 16y ago
      The self hosted Rust compiler is probably the largest piece of Rust code right now: https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/master/src/comp/ https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/master/src/comp/
      - supersillyus 16y ago
        Awesome. Thanks for the link. Didn't realize that existed.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    > * Rust does not have NULL!! That hardly strikes me as a feature. Null pointers simplify a lot of error-checking. Don't know if what you got back was valid? As easy as checking to see if it's zero!
tgflynn 16y ago
I'd like to see a better programming language. All of the existing languages involve accepting certain trade-offs. Of course maybe no "perfect" language can exist but until someone proves that there's always hope. For me the ideal language would : - Support OO, imperative and functional paradigms - Compile to fully optimized machine code with efficiency comparable to that of C - Provide language support for numerical multidimensional arrays and linear algebra with a syntax comparable to Matlab - Support list comprehensions - Provide map,list and set types similar to those of Python - Support dynamic typing - Support optional static typing, and contracts - Provide standard libraries with breadth of functionality comparable to those of Java but simpler API's (more like Python) - Provide a mechanism for efficient compile-time parametrization of algorithms, like C++ templates - Support free-form (ie. whitespace independent) syntax - Provide a high quality cross-platform GUI toolkit with support for OpenGL - Provide an interactive graphical environment for experimentation and data analysis - Provide a dataset abstraction similar to R data frames - Be supported by a high-quality IDE and debugger Of course that's a lot to ask for, but it would be nice to be able to do everything with a single unified syntax and environment.
- jamii 16y ago
  Ocaml hits most of the points on your list, if you can bring yourself to use a statically typed language. > Support OO, imperative and functional paradigms Yep. Objects aren't used all that often but they are fully supported and can do some things that are difficult in Java or C++ eg http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual007.html#toc39 http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual007.html#to... > Compile to fully optimized machine code with efficiency comparable to that of C Not quite, but ocamlopt generates pretty damn fast code and, more importantly, has very predictable performance. Ocaml makes a pretty good systems language as demonstrated by the recent Mirage paper: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-hotcloud-lamp.pdf http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-hotcloud-lamp.pdf > Provide language support for numerical multidimensional arrays and linear algebra with a syntax comparable to Matlab No, but this would make a good Jane Street summer project. Ocaml has extensible syntax via camlp4 and bindings to R, GSL and Matlab (no octave bindings for some reason). > Support list comprehensions Yes, as a syntax extension. http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/doc.preview:batteries-beta1/html/extensions.html#Comprehension http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/doc.preview:batteries-b... > Provide map,list and set types similar to those of Python The syntax is not as nice but apart from that: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Map.Make.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Map.Make.h... http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Hashtbl.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Hashtbl.ht... http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/List.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/List.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Set.S.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Set.S.html > Support dynamic typing Nope. You can circumvent the type system using Obj but its generally not advisable. > Support optional static typing, and contracts Static typing - yes. Contracts - see eg http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.157.5372&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.157... http://perso.eleves.bretagne.ens-cachan.fr/~dagand/opis/opis_presentation.pdf http://perso.eleves.bretagne.ens-cachan.fr/~dagand/opis/opis... > Provide standard libraries with breadth of functionality comparable to those of Java but simpler API's (more like Python) No. Ocaml Batteries is a start but nowhere near as broad as Python or Java. > Provide a mechanism for efficient compile-time parametrization of algorithms, like C++ templates Not just compile time specialization but multi-stage compilation via MetaOcaml. See eg http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.73.2541&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.73.... > Support free-form (ie. whitespace independent) syntax Yep, although there are some issues with the syntax eg dangling-else-like problems with nested matches. > Provide a high quality cross-platform GUI toolkit with support for OpenGL Well tested bingdings to Tk, Gtk and OpenGL. > Provide an interactive graphical environment for experimentation and data analysis None that I know of. I tend to use matplotlib and opengl interactively from the repl but its not up to the standards of mathematica etc. > Provide a dataset abstraction similar to R data frames I dont think so. I haven't used R much so I don't know exactly what features are missing. > Be supported by a high-quality IDE and debugger There are a couple of IDEs but none of them seem to be very well polished. Ocaml-mode and emacs is generally the way to go. The time-travelling ocaml debugger is pretty amazing. You can also compile with support for gdb for low level debugging.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Yes, The boundary between a file format and a programming language is fairly fuzzy too. I recently created a custom "little language" as a replacement for some rather fragile configuration routines. It won't need a lot of users to be a win. (and no, it wouldn't have been faster/easier to use Lua/Ruby/Python etc).
scott_s 16y ago
New programming languages are never necessary, but they should scratch some itch. Something that was cumbersome in other languages should be easy in the new language. Or the new language should be the union of things that only existed disjointly in other languages. Rust seems to fall in that latter category.
axod 16y ago
There's a spectrum from machine code up to high level languages. Pretty much all the points on that spectrum already have languages on them. We absolutely don't need any more languages. Languages aren't a problem that needs fixing. But they're fun to create, which is why people keep creating them. Also it's very much a 'social' and fashion driven thing. Some people can't bear to be using 'last years' language.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Languages aren't a problem that needs fixing. Keeping Multicore machines busy is a problem that needs fixing and it's also an example of a problem amenable to a solution in the form of a new language. http://gigaom.com/2008/06/19/multicores-not-so-secret-problem/ http://gigaom.com/2008/06/19/multicores-not-so-secret-proble...
  - axod 16y ago
    We've been told for around 10 years now that we'll soon have 128 cores in our laptops. It hasn't happened yet.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      Yeah, but now we have 8 cores in our desktops, and our popular languages can't handle that so well.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  If you think we don't need any new languages then either you aren't doing anything interesting, aren't paying attention, or you just don't care.
  - axod 16y ago
    Name some technological advance or achievement that has only been possible through the creation of a new programming language. edit: Thanks for the downmod to 0. It really does speak volumes.

by daeken 16y ago

quanticle 16y ago

It might be too soon to ask, but what distinguishes Rust from Google's Go or the D programming language? It seems to me that we've got three programming languages competing for the same niche.

daeken 16y ago
Not a whole lot, conceptually, it seems. The syntax feels very Nemerle-like to me, though, which is nice. Definitely something to play around with, if nothing else.
- hamilton 16y ago
  Having seen early versions of Rust (I work at Mozilla) I can tell you that the syntax is the last thing they're even considering (though that may have changed over the past few months). Seems like Graydon wants to get the guts right first.
  - quanticle 16y ago
    That gets back to my question. What are Rust's advantages over Go or D?
Semiapies 16y ago
Not entirely sure what distinguishes them, but I'd rather have some competition in the niche than avoid defaulting to the first language that addresses the niche.
- quanticle 16y ago
  That's true, but this whole effort smells like an exercise in wheel re-invention to me.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    If you know what you're doing, that's a valid way to try to make better wheels.
neilk 16y ago
From https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/language-faq https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/language-faq : *Have you seen this Google language, Go? How does Rust compare?* Yes. Rust development was several years underway before Go launched, no direct inspiration. Though Pike’s previous languages in the Go family (Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo) were influential. Go adopted semantics (safety and memory model) that are quite unsatisfactory. - Shared mutable state. - Global GC. - Null pointers. - No RAII or destructors. - No type-parametric user code. There are a number of other fine coroutine / actor languages in development presently. It’s an area of focus across the PL community.
- quanticle 16y ago
  Thanks for that. It wasn't clear from the linked article that Rust was started before Go. The overall impression that I got from TFA was that Rust is another instance of the garbage-collected system language fad.
  - ramchip 16y ago
    What are the other instances? Besides Go, I don't recall many languages that fit the bill. There's D, but it's not very new and certainly not a fad language.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      And it's only garbage collected if you want it to be. (My friends are making an exokernel in D)
  - konad 16y ago
    I think the fact that Rust is older and yet Go has 1000s of active programmers is indicative of something. "Ship early, ship often" springs to mind. The Plan9 community has been working like that for years, almost every day an updated version is available (the distro cdrom is rebuilt every night) with bug fixes / improvements / new stuff.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- effn 16y ago
  Rust is not very functional at all. E.g. no lambda, no closures (yet).
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
effn 16y ago
Compared to Go: * Rust does not have NULL!! * Rust has parametric polymorphism. * Rust has more predictable memory/cpu usage thanks to forgoing global GC for a novel memory management model based on stack allocation/RAII, immutability, isolated processes and reference counting. * Rust has a very Erlang-like model of handling failures. * Rust has typestate, which is an easy to use way of proving properties about your program statically, or check them dynamically via assertion. * Rust has no shared mutable state. Those are facts. My personal, more subjective, opinion is that Rust is a lot better thought out than either D or Go. If this niche is too crowded, I'd rather see them go and Rust win. :) But given that Rust lacks shared global GC, I guess you could say it's closer to C++
- supersillyus 16y ago
  I think Rust is very interesting and quite exciting, but it's hard to evaluate in relation to other languages (for me, at least) because it is really really young. I've never seen a useful program written in Rust. All of the features sound really good in theory, but I've never used a similar language, so I don't have a sense for how these features work in practice. Actually, anybody have a link to some non-trivial Rust code?
  - effn 16y ago
    The self hosted Rust compiler is probably the largest piece of Rust code right now: https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/master/src/comp/ https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/master/src/comp/
    - supersillyus 16y ago
      Awesome. Thanks for the link. Didn't realize that existed.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  > * Rust does not have NULL!! That hardly strikes me as a feature. Null pointers simplify a lot of error-checking. Don't know if what you got back was valid? As easy as checking to see if it's zero!

tgflynn 16y ago

I'd like to see a better programming language. All of the existing languages involve accepting certain trade-offs. Of course maybe no "perfect" language can exist but until someone proves that there's always hope. For me the ideal language would : - Support OO, imperative and functional paradigms - Compile to fully optimized machine code with efficiency comparable to that of C - Provide language support for numerical multidimensional arrays and linear algebra with a syntax comparable to Matlab - Support list comprehensions - Provide map,list and set types similar to those of Python - Support dynamic typing - Support optional static typing, and contracts - Provide standard libraries with breadth of functionality comparable to those of Java but simpler API's (more like Python) - Provide a mechanism for efficient compile-time parametrization of algorithms, like C++ templates - Support free-form (ie. whitespace independent) syntax - Provide a high quality cross-platform GUI toolkit with support for OpenGL - Provide an interactive graphical environment for experimentation and data analysis - Provide a dataset abstraction similar to R data frames - Be supported by a high-quality IDE and debugger Of course that's a lot to ask for, but it would be nice to be able to do everything with a single unified syntax and environment.

jamii 16y ago
Ocaml hits most of the points on your list, if you can bring yourself to use a statically typed language. > Support OO, imperative and functional paradigms Yep. Objects aren't used all that often but they are fully supported and can do some things that are difficult in Java or C++ eg http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual007.html#toc39 http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual007.html#to... > Compile to fully optimized machine code with efficiency comparable to that of C Not quite, but ocamlopt generates pretty damn fast code and, more importantly, has very predictable performance. Ocaml makes a pretty good systems language as demonstrated by the recent Mirage paper: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-hotcloud-lamp.pdf http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-hotcloud-lamp.pdf > Provide language support for numerical multidimensional arrays and linear algebra with a syntax comparable to Matlab No, but this would make a good Jane Street summer project. Ocaml has extensible syntax via camlp4 and bindings to R, GSL and Matlab (no octave bindings for some reason). > Support list comprehensions Yes, as a syntax extension. http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/doc.preview:batteries-beta1/html/extensions.html#Comprehension http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/doc.preview:batteries-b... > Provide map,list and set types similar to those of Python The syntax is not as nice but apart from that: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Map.Make.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Map.Make.h... http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Hashtbl.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Hashtbl.ht... http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/List.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/List.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Set.S.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Set.S.html > Support dynamic typing Nope. You can circumvent the type system using Obj but its generally not advisable. > Support optional static typing, and contracts Static typing - yes. Contracts - see eg http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.157.5372&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.157... http://perso.eleves.bretagne.ens-cachan.fr/~dagand/opis/opis_presentation.pdf http://perso.eleves.bretagne.ens-cachan.fr/~dagand/opis/opis... > Provide standard libraries with breadth of functionality comparable to those of Java but simpler API's (more like Python) No. Ocaml Batteries is a start but nowhere near as broad as Python or Java. > Provide a mechanism for efficient compile-time parametrization of algorithms, like C++ templates Not just compile time specialization but multi-stage compilation via MetaOcaml. See eg http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.73.2541&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.73.... > Support free-form (ie. whitespace independent) syntax Yep, although there are some issues with the syntax eg dangling-else-like problems with nested matches. > Provide a high quality cross-platform GUI toolkit with support for OpenGL Well tested bingdings to Tk, Gtk and OpenGL. > Provide an interactive graphical environment for experimentation and data analysis None that I know of. I tend to use matplotlib and opengl interactively from the repl but its not up to the standards of mathematica etc. > Provide a dataset abstraction similar to R data frames I dont think so. I haven't used R much so I don't know exactly what features are missing. > Be supported by a high-quality IDE and debugger There are a couple of IDEs but none of them seem to be very well polished. Ocaml-mode and emacs is generally the way to go. The time-travelling ocaml debugger is pretty amazing. You can also compile with support for gdb for low level debugging.

joe_the_user 16y ago

Yes, The boundary between a file format and a programming language is fairly fuzzy too. I recently created a custom "little language" as a replacement for some rather fragile configuration routines. It won't need a lot of users to be a win. (and no, it wouldn't have been faster/easier to use Lua/Ruby/Python etc).

scott_s 16y ago

New programming languages are never necessary, but they should scratch some itch. Something that was cumbersome in other languages should be easy in the new language. Or the new language should be the union of things that only existed disjointly in other languages. Rust seems to fall in that latter category.

axod 16y ago

There's a spectrum from machine code up to high level languages. Pretty much all the points on that spectrum already have languages on them. We absolutely don't need any more languages. Languages aren't a problem that needs fixing. But they're fun to create, which is why people keep creating them. Also it's very much a 'social' and fashion driven thing. Some people can't bear to be using 'last years' language.

stcredzero 16y ago
Languages aren't a problem that needs fixing. Keeping Multicore machines busy is a problem that needs fixing and it's also an example of a problem amenable to a solution in the form of a new language. http://gigaom.com/2008/06/19/multicores-not-so-secret-problem/ http://gigaom.com/2008/06/19/multicores-not-so-secret-proble...
- axod 16y ago
  We've been told for around 10 years now that we'll soon have 128 cores in our laptops. It hasn't happened yet.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Yeah, but now we have 8 cores in our desktops, and our popular languages can't handle that so well.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
If you think we don't need any new languages then either you aren't doing anything interesting, aren't paying attention, or you just don't care.
- axod 16y ago
  Name some technological advance or achievement that has only been possible through the creation of a new programming language. edit: Thanks for the downmod to 0. It really does speak volumes.