4 ms·

Yeah, Modula-3 had everything that the new kids like Java/C#/Go try to sell you years before, but I think Trestle would need some modernization before it could

by mhd 4y ago

Yeah, Modula-3 had everything that the new kids like Java/C#/Go try to sell you years before, but I think Trestle would need some modernization before it could keep up visually with Qt/Gtk/etc (assuming that you can still "sell" that, as the kids these days really like their whitespacey Electron). It's a bit like Common Lisp's CLIM in that regard. And, of course, in a land where Bell Labs won, upper-case keywords instead of glyphs are hard to sell.

ajb 4y ago
The problem with Modula-3 was that it had all that good stuff, but the official distribution was enormous (relative to machines of the day). If they had invented NPM too, they might have had a better chance.
- mhd 4y ago
  CPAN was roughly contemporary, and about at the time when "downloading" became an option. But on the general notion, I'd vehemently disagree. Not having stuff in your standard library but spread about is one of the worst things the languages in this generation copied from C++. Give me a good standard library. Maybe factor out the UI and definitely truly adjacent packages like Obliq. Note that a huge library also didn't hurt Java too much. And there it was even worse, as you had to distribute most of it as a runtime, whereas a compiled language usually gets by with less (take this with a grain of salt, I don't remember how huge Modula-3's equivalent to MSVCRT was back then on Windows, for example).
  - ajb 4y ago
    At the time I'm thinking of, late 90's, python, which had a decent std library, was easily installable, but SRC m3 definitely wasn't - at least on a cheap student sized machine. I seem to recall that he successor projects like CM3 tried to produce pared down versions. All this of course pales into insignificance against the amount of crap something like Android Studio downloads today to build a trivial app. But at the time, I think it was a lot. The HD I went to uni with was only 40MB, for example.
pjmlp 4y ago
Java designers officially mentioned Modula-3 as source of inspiration, sadly they forgot value types and AOT in the process and are still catching up on that front. C# is finally there, since .NET Native and the improvements they keep doing since C# 7. Sadly WinDev keeps ignoring what comes out of DevDiv, they worship their COM with C++ implementations. Go, well, plenty to catch up in regards to Modula-3 features. While upper case keywords are a bit of a bummer, like on Visual Basic and most modern SQL tooling, there are options to automatically format keywords into uppercase. Among all modern alternatives, I would say C# 11 and Swift are the closest to Modula-3, with a rich ecosystem in the backpack. D and Nim could also be candidates, but they still miss much of the tooling to make them competitive in current times.

by mhd 4y ago

ajb 4y ago

The problem with Modula-3 was that it had all that good stuff, but the official distribution was enormous (relative to machines of the day). If they had invented NPM too, they might have had a better chance.

mhd 4y ago
CPAN was roughly contemporary, and about at the time when "downloading" became an option. But on the general notion, I'd vehemently disagree. Not having stuff in your standard library but spread about is one of the worst things the languages in this generation copied from C++. Give me a good standard library. Maybe factor out the UI and definitely truly adjacent packages like Obliq. Note that a huge library also didn't hurt Java too much. And there it was even worse, as you had to distribute most of it as a runtime, whereas a compiled language usually gets by with less (take this with a grain of salt, I don't remember how huge Modula-3's equivalent to MSVCRT was back then on Windows, for example).
- ajb 4y ago
  At the time I'm thinking of, late 90's, python, which had a decent std library, was easily installable, but SRC m3 definitely wasn't - at least on a cheap student sized machine. I seem to recall that he successor projects like CM3 tried to produce pared down versions. All this of course pales into insignificance against the amount of crap something like Android Studio downloads today to build a trivial app. But at the time, I think it was a lot. The HD I went to uni with was only 40MB, for example.

pjmlp 4y ago

Java designers officially mentioned Modula-3 as source of inspiration, sadly they forgot value types and AOT in the process and are still catching up on that front. C# is finally there, since .NET Native and the improvements they keep doing since C# 7. Sadly WinDev keeps ignoring what comes out of DevDiv, they worship their COM with C++ implementations. Go, well, plenty to catch up in regards to Modula-3 features. While upper case keywords are a bit of a bummer, like on Visual Basic and most modern SQL tooling, there are options to automatically format keywords into uppercase. Among all modern alternatives, I would say C# 11 and Swift are the closest to Modula-3, with a rich ecosystem in the backpack. D and Nim could also be candidates, but they still miss much of the tooling to make them competitive in current times.