4 ms·

Given how many features Ecstasy has that seem to come straight out of Kotlin and Ceylon, it's quite surprising to see Cameron write [1]: > I've never used Kotl

Given how many features Ecstasy has that seem to come straight out of Kotlin and Ceylon, it's quite surprising to see Cameron write [1]: > I've never used Kotlin or Ceylon myself, but over the past few months I have had a chance to look at some of what they did, and I couldn't believe how many choices that they had made were very similar to things that we had done. I would hope that someone who decides to create a language would spend some time studying a lot of languages, especially those that came out in the past ten years. Additional posts state similar things [2]: > I've never gotten to work in either Smalltalk or Lisp and same for Haskell or OCaml. This makes me worried that Ecstasy is being created in a vacuum with little knowledge of the current and past state of the art. [1] https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-exception.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-exception.ht... [2] https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html

haolez 7y ago
By the way, is Ceylon still a thing? It looked so cool and well thought out, but I haven’t heard about it in a long while.
- latchkey 7y ago
  Never got traction and was axed.
- core-questions 7y ago
  It's called Sri Lanka now ;)
z3t4 7y ago
When learning a programming language; it takes several years to discover the deficiencies, after a few more years you can work around and avoid them. keep doing it several more years and you almost forget about them.
- mncharity 7y ago
  >> someone who decides to create a language [...should] spend some time studying a lot of languages > When learning a programming language; it takes several years [for you] to discover the deficiencies A valid response. Also a sad commentary on our impoverished and siloed/balkanized professional literature and communities around programming language design and implementation.
cpurdy 7y ago
> "I would hope that someone who decides to create a language would spend some time studying a lot of languages, especially those that came out in the past ten years." Yes, I would hope the same thing. Before designing Ecstasy, we spent a period of time evaluating existing languages (and language runtimes) for the specific use case that we had in mind (related to serverless cloud infrastructure and applications, but with some very specific goals). That included Javascript and the V8 engine (a horrid language, but an _amazing_ runtime that came as close as any to fitting our goals), Google's Go (Gene is now a big fan, but it was a poor fit for our goals), Rust (briefly -- it wasn't a good match), and a small dive into Swift. Previously, I had read a fair bit about Smalltalk, but never got to use it for any work; Erlang is similar in that I've read about it, but never had an opportunity to use it in the wild. I'm impressed by ideas in both of these, but I find the languages themselves to be quite unappealing (to put it nicely). So why didn't we look at Kotlin? Well, probably because I had the wrong idea of what it was, and once you get a wrong idea in your head, the wrong idea is hard to displace. Patrick Linskey was the developer who, after looking at the Ecstasy design at the time, suggested that we look at Kotlin. (He and his team use Kotlin a fair bit in their work.) I had read some stuff years back that Gavin wrote about Kotlin, but had not thought to look at the language itself. I was under the impression that it was dormant. (I've since gotten in touch with Gavin ... I think it's pretty cool that we had similar concepts as he did.) In retrospect, the language that I wish that I would have spent time looking at is Elixir (not necessarily to use it, but because some of the same things that it is attempting to address are relevant). The challenge is that there are many creative people building many creative things, and we only have so many hours in the day to read and learn and use these things! I read a few hundred pages of technical topics every day, and I still can't keep up with even 1% of what is happening in our industry. Also, over the years that I was designing the concepts that eventually formed Ecstasy, I spent a great deal of time talking with friends in the PL and language-runtime arena like Guy Steele, Rich Hickey, Doug Lea, James Strachan, various members of the Sun/Oracle Java team, Gil Tene (Azul pauseless GC), and so on. Many of the topics that I was investigating were ones suggested by these folks. But in general, like many people who enjoy this kind of thing, I know what I like when I see it, and I collect ideas and thoughts over time. If you're a fan of poetry, I'd suggest Rilke's "For the Sake of a Single Poem", to understand how the first word of Ecstasy came to exist.

haolez 7y ago

By the way, is Ceylon still a thing? It looked so cool and well thought out, but I haven’t heard about it in a long while.

latchkey 7y ago
Never got traction and was axed.
core-questions 7y ago
It's called Sri Lanka now ;)

z3t4 7y ago

When learning a programming language; it takes several years to discover the deficiencies, after a few more years you can work around and avoid them. keep doing it several more years and you almost forget about them.

mncharity 7y ago
>> someone who decides to create a language [...should] spend some time studying a lot of languages > When learning a programming language; it takes several years [for you] to discover the deficiencies A valid response. Also a sad commentary on our impoverished and siloed/balkanized professional literature and communities around programming language design and implementation.

cpurdy 7y ago

> "I would hope that someone who decides to create a language would spend some time studying a lot of languages, especially those that came out in the past ten years." Yes, I would hope the same thing. Before designing Ecstasy, we spent a period of time evaluating existing languages (and language runtimes) for the specific use case that we had in mind (related to serverless cloud infrastructure and applications, but with some very specific goals). That included Javascript and the V8 engine (a horrid language, but an _amazing_ runtime that came as close as any to fitting our goals), Google's Go (Gene is now a big fan, but it was a poor fit for our goals), Rust (briefly -- it wasn't a good match), and a small dive into Swift. Previously, I had read a fair bit about Smalltalk, but never got to use it for any work; Erlang is similar in that I've read about it, but never had an opportunity to use it in the wild. I'm impressed by ideas in both of these, but I find the languages themselves to be quite unappealing (to put it nicely). So why didn't we look at Kotlin? Well, probably because I had the wrong idea of what it was, and once you get a wrong idea in your head, the wrong idea is hard to displace. Patrick Linskey was the developer who, after looking at the Ecstasy design at the time, suggested that we look at Kotlin. (He and his team use Kotlin a fair bit in their work.) I had read some stuff years back that Gavin wrote about Kotlin, but had not thought to look at the language itself. I was under the impression that it was dormant. (I've since gotten in touch with Gavin ... I think it's pretty cool that we had similar concepts as he did.) In retrospect, the language that I wish that I would have spent time looking at is Elixir (not necessarily to use it, but because some of the same things that it is attempting to address are relevant). The challenge is that there are many creative people building many creative things, and we only have so many hours in the day to read and learn and use these things! I read a few hundred pages of technical topics every day, and I still can't keep up with even 1% of what is happening in our industry. Also, over the years that I was designing the concepts that eventually formed Ecstasy, I spent a great deal of time talking with friends in the PL and language-runtime arena like Guy Steele, Rich Hickey, Doug Lea, James Strachan, various members of the Sun/Oracle Java team, Gil Tene (Azul pauseless GC), and so on. Many of the topics that I was investigating were ones suggested by these folks. But in general, like many people who enjoy this kind of thing, I know what I like when I see it, and I collect ideas and thoughts over time. If you're a fan of poetry, I'd suggest Rilke's "For the Sake of a Single Poem", to understand how the first word of Ecstasy came to exist.