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Also not many languages allow people to explore true powers of deeper stack modifications by delimited continuations. Using them the users would be able to crea

Also not many languages allow people to explore true powers of deeper stack modifications by delimited continuations. Using them the users would be able to create their own looping and threading constructs as well as custom exceptions and iterator mechanisms and effect handlers. The concept of a "programmable" programming language is intuitively appealing, but in practice turns out to not be so helpful for actually shipping software. Everybody builds their own, incompatible versions of common utilities. This is why languages like Lisp or Forth are great for exploratory hacking with small teams but are very rarely used these days for larger scale development and lag far behind more mainstream languages in tooling. What you really want is a tasteful "omakase" language design that gives you a carefully selected menu of building blocks that average developers can use to be productive. Languages like Kotlin and Swift are a good example of this. They cherry pick a lot of the good ideas from academic functional programming without going down the Scala/Haskell rabbit hole. Golang takes this to an extreme by providing native typed containers without exposing generics to the programmer. The success of a language these days depends at least as much on the library ecosystem and tooling as it does on the language itself.

mpweiher 8y ago
> programmable programming language ... appealing ... not so helpful This has also been my observation, and that of many actual Lisp hackers I talked to. It also mirrors the experience the developers of Smalltalk documented: at first they had ultimate flexibility, every object could in effect re-define the language completely. Not so good. On the other hand, we also seem to be stuck a bit in a local maximum of expressiveness that, to many including myself, seems obviously not expressive enough. What if ... the idea of a programmable programming language is actually good, but the implementations have not been as useful as we thought? I think what is missing is a good meta-model and a good "language library", for want of a better term. With most programmable programming languages, you are basically given the "it can do everything, now have fun" treatment. So everyone has some fun, implements "their own, incompatible versions of common utilities" then realises this isn't quite as useful as it was thought to be and gives up. Going back to OO, I would claim that most OO "languages" by themselves are somewhat useless. What makes them incredibly useful is their class libraries. It is of course the languages that make these class libraries possible, but that's a second-order effect. In fact, Smalltalkers have the saying "Talk small, but carry a big class library" (repurposing "speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far."). For me, the most useful meta-model is the analysis of software into components, connectors and styles that the software architecture people came up with. It appears to capture most of the variations in how we build software and has a useful, empirically built taxonomy. In this meta-model, the connectors pretty much define styles, so the "language library" I mentioned above becomes a "connector library" in actual usable artefacts. Interestingly, existing languages seem to be describable as a set of connectors, and the connectors are very much related, so this does seem to solve the problem of lack of guidance.
- 0-_-0 8y ago
  This makes sense, the latest C++ standard for example makes C++ a great language, but without a great standard library built on top (the current STL is quite clunky) C++ is much more inconvenient to use than Python for example.

mpweiher 8y ago

> programmable programming language ... appealing ... not so helpful This has also been my observation, and that of many actual Lisp hackers I talked to. It also mirrors the experience the developers of Smalltalk documented: at first they had ultimate flexibility, every object could in effect re-define the language completely. Not so good. On the other hand, we also seem to be stuck a bit in a local maximum of expressiveness that, to many including myself, seems obviously not expressive enough. What if ... the idea of a programmable programming language is actually good, but the implementations have not been as useful as we thought? I think what is missing is a good meta-model and a good "language library", for want of a better term. With most programmable programming languages, you are basically given the "it can do everything, now have fun" treatment. So everyone has some fun, implements "their own, incompatible versions of common utilities" then realises this isn't quite as useful as it was thought to be and gives up. Going back to OO, I would claim that most OO "languages" by themselves are somewhat useless. What makes them incredibly useful is their class libraries. It is of course the languages that make these class libraries possible, but that's a second-order effect. In fact, Smalltalkers have the saying "Talk small, but carry a big class library" (repurposing "speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far."). For me, the most useful meta-model is the analysis of software into components, connectors and styles that the software architecture people came up with. It appears to capture most of the variations in how we build software and has a useful, empirically built taxonomy. In this meta-model, the connectors pretty much define styles, so the "language library" I mentioned above becomes a "connector library" in actual usable artefacts. Interestingly, existing languages seem to be describable as a set of connectors, and the connectors are very much related, so this does seem to solve the problem of lack of guidance.

0-_-0 8y ago
This makes sense, the latest C++ standard for example makes C++ a great language, but without a great standard library built on top (the current STL is quite clunky) C++ is much more inconvenient to use than Python for example.