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Thanks for your two posts, I agree with pretty much all of what you're saying. When you look at the millions of man-hours that have gone into the "burn it all

Thanks for your two posts, I agree with pretty much all of what you're saying. When you look at the millions of man-hours that have gone into the "burn it all down and start from scratch" languages (Go, Rust, etc) and you consider what if those guys had written new compilers for JAVA syntax? How great that would be. They could still accomplish many Go and Rust objectives without having to completely invent their own non-Java-like syntax. Even something that was "Java-like" is better than burning it all down every time something new is needed.

tombert 6y ago
I don't think I agree with your last point; I actually think that the Java syntax isn't particularly great, even for the time. I don't think that Java's idea of object oriented design is ideal (I'm more of a fan of the ObjectiveC/SmallTalk model), and that version of OOP is all Java really contributes from a syntax perspective...otherwise it's largely just C/C++'s syntax. However, in a sister thread I think you mentioned that you are basically alright with languages targeting the same VM, which I think is probably a better path forward for a majority of use-cases. Clojure and Kotlin and Scala all benefit from being more-or-less fully interoperable with each other; as a result, one can feel free to experiment with language design to their heart's content without too much fragmentation. That said, I don't know that it's entirely fair to completely criticize Rust on this; Rust exists specifically to address issues with C and C++, languages without garbage collection, and whose design doesn't quite allow the same level of compiler safety and goodness that Rust does, though to be fair Rust does have C FFI so it's not necessarily always reinventing the wheel either. I mean, I agree with the blog post we're chatting on top of; Rust might be super awesome for systems-ey stuff, but for anything TCP-or-higher, I think a managed language is kind of better.

tombert 6y ago

I don't think I agree with your last point; I actually think that the Java syntax isn't particularly great, even for the time. I don't think that Java's idea of object oriented design is ideal (I'm more of a fan of the ObjectiveC/SmallTalk model), and that version of OOP is all Java really contributes from a syntax perspective...otherwise it's largely just C/C++'s syntax. However, in a sister thread I think you mentioned that you are basically alright with languages targeting the same VM, which I think is probably a better path forward for a majority of use-cases. Clojure and Kotlin and Scala all benefit from being more-or-less fully interoperable with each other; as a result, one can feel free to experiment with language design to their heart's content without too much fragmentation. That said, I don't know that it's entirely fair to completely criticize Rust on this; Rust exists specifically to address issues with C and C++, languages without garbage collection, and whose design doesn't quite allow the same level of compiler safety and goodness that Rust does, though to be fair Rust does have C FFI so it's not necessarily always reinventing the wheel either. I mean, I agree with the blog post we're chatting on top of; Rust might be super awesome for systems-ey stuff, but for anything TCP-or-higher, I think a managed language is kind of better.