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He indicates Haskell and Lisp as the two leading candidates for Omega, but I think that just illustrates the wrongness of the premise that there is a singular e
by lukev 16y ago
He indicates Haskell and Lisp as the two leading candidates for Omega, but I think that just illustrates the wrongness of the premise that there is a singular end-game as far as languages go.
The thing is, you couldn't have a convergence of Lisp and Haskell without destroying what makes them good at the same time. The essence of Lisp is that it is endlessly dynamic, the essence of Haskell is its insanely strong type system. I can't think of any way these could be effectively combined.
These languages aren't converging on a as-yet-unknown Omega point, they started at more or less the same point and then took off in completely different directions, and they aren't looking back.
- Inaimathi 16y agoAgreed, except with the "they aren't looking back" part. If that were true, Lisk and Liskell wouldn't exist (and people wouldn't be wondering aloud "How can I get pattern matching-definitions or point free style in Lisp?") The conclusion of the article was more or less that you can't get a perfect combination of the two, and that any unification that might emerge will have to make decisions about which features to cherry-pick. I'm also not clear on what you mean by "they started at more or less the same point".
- lukev 16y agoPoint taken about Lisk and Liskell. But I think that that is, as you say, cherry picking features, not actually merging the philosophies of the two languages. As for the same starting point, both had their origins in academic programming language research. It's true they don't have a direct common ancestor, but the point I was making was that their creators were aware of the issues, and chose very different directions as solutions to basically the same problem.