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"Constraints as power" describes the proposition of all statically typed languages. But the compilers of popular languages weren't smart enough to cover many co
by Kinrany 4y ago
"Constraints as power" describes the proposition of all statically typed languages. But the compilers of popular languages weren't smart enough to cover many common scenarios, forcing language designers to offer many unsafe escape hatches.
- benreesman 4y agoIt’s a very valuable thing to be able to separate the mental model one uses from the target machine language. I worry about the more ardent Rust enthusiasts because it seems popular in those circles to embrace an attitude that we’ve somehow arrived at the right conceptual framework. Rust is a competent, pragmatic embedding of a few of the big ideas from serious PLT into a well-optimized C++ compiler toolchain, and it’s cool and useful as a result. But I hope to God it’s not the endgame on fast ML/Haskell/Lisp.
- tialaramex 4y agoI'd be disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire (perhaps a decade or at most two in the future) is Rust. We can surely do better. But I'd be even more disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire isn't even Rust.
- ldng 4y agoTo be successful a language still has to be approachable to most dev. I just hope you are not conflating PLT with Functional. Look what functionalist did to Scala... It had an interesting balance and they destroyed it.
- pjmlp 4y agoInterestingly Object Pascal was my introduction to data type modelling for constraints, followed by Caml Light, Modula-3 and Ada. Naturally one can argue they weren't popular, with exception of Object Pascal.