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It’s interesting to me that there are multiple calls in the comments for updated entries (rust, zig, elixir, etc). But no one has actually thrown one down here.
by travisgriggs 3y ago
It’s interesting to me that there are multiple calls in the comments for updated entries (rust, zig, elixir, etc). But no one has actually thrown one down here. I notice that no one even mentioned Swift or Kotlin.
For me as a long time practitioner of many languages, one of the telling points is that most/all of the new entries I might write for any of the newer languages would lack personality. Historically, languages had opinions about things. C was common assembler. Smalltalk was objects. Lisp was lists. You could easily riff on these languages “first principles.”
Modern languages feel more like political committees trying to keep as many constituents happy as possible.
- mepian 3y ago"In a history of Smalltalk I wrote for ACM, I characterized one way of looking at languages in this way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features or they’re a crystallization of style. Languages such as APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style languages, where there’s a real center and imputed style to how you’re supposed to do everything. Other languages such as PL/I and, indeed, languages that try to be additive without consolidation have often been more successful." — Alan Kay in https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
- jeltz 3y agoZig very much has opinions about things and is not created by a committee. I suspect that is why people here want to see it included. Rust is s bit of s mixed bag, while it has strong opinions it also suffers w bit from committee design but that is true for C++ too which is in the article.
- lelanthran 3y ago> Rust is s bit of s mixed bag, while it has strong opinions it also suffers w bit from committee design but that is true for C++ too which is in the article. Too true, but C++ is rare in that, while being opinionated, it is strongly opinionated in multiple directions (multiple opinions?).
- gpderetta 3y agoC++ has all the opinions!
- lelanthran 3y ago> C++ has all the opinions! Yeah, but it didn't create any of its own, it just inherited them ;-)
- aidenn0 3y agoIt virtually inherited them :P
- lmm 3y agoI see it as a positive sign: after 60 years of mainstream programming the field is finally maturing enough that we've got some consensus about what languages should look like (Scoping should be lexical. Types should exist but mostly be inferred. Etc.). We're past the "cambrian explosion" stage and now there's more iterating and polishing what works.
- _rednax_ 3y agoTotally agree, a world where every language had it's own "thing" and felt the need for that thing to warp every aspect of the language would be much worse.