10 ms·

“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)

279 points by teleforce 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago
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whazor 10mo ago
With a Domain Specific Language (DSL), you parse code and build an abstract syntax tree. But you can also build a Python library where you construct the same tree. With the benefit that LLMs are already better trained on Python code. If you need a deterministic programming language, you could use starlark.
- conartist6 10mo ago
  DSL is a term with such fuzzy meaning, I don't like it at all. It's always valid to just say "language". Languages and libraries don't even have to be opposing concepts either. Let's say you write the first ever JSON parsing library. Did you just create a library? Or a language?
  - librasteve 10mo ago
    I have started gathering DSL specific content over on https://reddit.com/r/domainspecificlangs https://reddit.com/r/domainspecificlangs … there are several definitions over there. Personally I would distinguish between a drop down DSL and a full blown independent language.
  - morshu9001 10mo ago
    Doesn't seem fuzzy to me. JSON parser is a lib.
  - whazor 9mo ago
    A language is normally defined by a grammar and can be parsed. The definition can be very formal. Alternatively a library is a construct in a pre-existing programming language. For example in Python you pip install a package, import some classes and functions. But where these concepts can overlap is that you could define your domain logic as a language, or by calling functions in a library. In the past, I was a big believer in domain specific languages. However, AI will outperform when generating Python code with using a new library.
xigoi 10mo ago
The quotation marks having been stripped from the title changes the meaning quite a bit…
- pfdietz 10mo ago
  I admit the article is not what I at first expected. But I liked it. The references to Ruby feel dated, though.
tonyg 10mo ago
I will not. I refuse
- imadierich 10mo ago
  [dead]
conartist6 10mo ago
Yes! This is also why I think it's stupid that languages are now trying to kill their most popular libraries as a matter of principle. E.g. node says "oh no, you need a library to write tests!" and now that means that you have to have a testing framework built into your runtime. And of course it's just another library, really, that competes with the original one, but this one is blessed with standards so it has a monopolistic advantage that will deter further innovation.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > And of course it's just another library, really, that competes with the original one, but this one is blessed with standards so it has a monopolistic advantage that will deter further innovation. It's called convenience. You're free to create a testing library so good that it'll knock socks off the stdlib one.
  - conartist6 10mo ago
    My question is so simple: why is a level playing field seen as bad now? Have we given up on having a market economy? You can't have a fair game when one team playing is also the referee. Yet everywhere I look that's the way of it. Apple runs the app store so that they can also ensures that every successful app is theirs. The supermarket stocks the shelves, but also uses their position of power to kill successful independent brands. Node takes libraries which have taken years of work and shits out builtins with at most a week invested. I think it's a national embarrassment: anticompetition to the point of communism held up as if it were the genuine spirit of the American Dream.
    - Jtsummers 10mo ago
      > Node takes libraries which have taken years of work and shits out builtins with at most a week invested. > I think it's a national embarrassment: anticompetition to the point of communism held up as if it were the genuine spirit of the American Dream. You think including a testing library in a language implementation or standard tooling is tantamount to communism?
CPLX 10mo ago
I know that HN is famously a discussion forum where users comment based on the titles of submitted articles, rather than their content. With that said, the divergence in comments on this very insightful and well written article will soon provide an unusually clear means of determining who is commenting on the title and who is commenting on the article.
- fredrikholm 10mo ago
  The omission of quotations in the title triggered my Lisp-damaged brain to man the walls, only to immediately be met with Ruby and Scheme examples. False alarm.
- tialaramex 10mo ago
  That's fair. It's also the case that to some extent HN's article titles serve the same purpose as that one line description in a speed dating event. They're ice breakers, everybody has the same prompt and then writes about that, and even if they did read the article which I agree often they don't, they come at it from a different angle. I feel similarly to the article author, it is trivially true that we could express anything in all the general purpose languages, that's what general purpose even means, but I find for Computer Languages the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis checks out pretty well. The language changes how you think about the problem.
  - CPLX 10mo ago
    As a long-time HN contributor, I believe in visualizing myself like water flowing downhill. As such, I certainly would never try to overturn the prevailing culture of commenting on article titles and in fact engaging in it myself from time to time.
jll29 10mo ago
The OP's point is well-taken: a new language usually forces you to change 100% of your environment and tooling, whereas a new library respects your habits and preferences. I follow new language developments with keen interest, but few of them will ever reach the level of maturity to be considered serious candidates for adoption. It's also risky to adopt a language that you cannot easily hire developers for, for example. Libraries are great, but there is only so much they can address, and that depends on the language, too, as the article correctly points out. And there are two kinds of libries: tool libraries and frameworks. Someone once said it nicely: "Frameworks are like Hollywood - 'You don't call us, we call you!'". Frameworks often require you to submit to their control flow rather the other way round; that's why I prefer tool libraries.
- kayo_20211030 10mo ago
  Agree. I don't know why a statement that uncontroversial got the bums rush.
dev_l1x_be 10mo ago
I would love to have a scripting language has typed features and you can replace bash with. What comes close is: #! /usr/bin/env elixir Mix.install([:jason]) defmodule JsonPrettyPrinter do def get_stdin_data do :stdio |> IO.read(:all) |> Jason.decode() |> case do {:ok, json_data} -> json_data _ -> raise "Invalid JSON payload was provided" end end end JsonPrettyPrinter.get_stdin_data() |> JsonPrettyPrinter.pretty_print_json() |> IO.puts()
- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  Two interesting options for everyday scripting are Python and Powershell.
  - b40d-48b2-979e 10mo ago
    A nice part of PowerShell: you can `Add-Type` and embed C#/F# when you want.
  - logicallee 10mo ago
    you won't believe how powerful Python is with libraries. ChatGPT and Claude made a brand new browser, that isn't based on Chromium or Firefox, and yet still follows many aspects of layout correctly. I read the article we're discussing ("stop designing languages") on this browser and I'm currently using it to post this reply.
    - F3nd0 10mo ago
      Knowing that LLM’s have been extensively trained on public code, I wonder how much of it is based on Chromium or Firefox.
      - logicallee 10mo ago
        That's a good question! You can read through the entire source code for the latest version: https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/171toy-browser.py.txt https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/171toy-browser.py.t... it doesn't look like it would be easily derived from Chromium or Firefox, because this code is Python and those don't use Python this way. By the way is there any feature you'd like to see added to the toy browser? The goal is that one day it's a replacement for Chrome, Firefox, etc. It's being built by ChatGPT and Claude at the moment. Let me know if there are any feature ideas you have that would be cool to add.
shevy-java 10mo ago
> But thanks to Ruby on Rails, he doesn't have to! So he said that he has no particular opinion about the Ruby programming language, but he absolutely loves Rails. Ruby got a hype phase with regards to rails. It then dropped. A lot. TIOBE, while it is in general crap, is somewhat accurate when you plot things over time: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ruby/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ruby/ So, ruby peaked with rails between 2006 to 2009 or so, give or take. Then the decline phase set in, and now it is unfortunately also crawling behind perl into extinction. This is very unfortunate - I still use ruby almost daily as the ultimate glue language. But this can not be denied now that ruby is following the extinction path perl already had going some years before. I was using ruby before rails was created and ruby covers all my web-needs. I had a web-framework in PHP, used it for about three years, ported it into ruby and expanded it massively in the last 20 years or so (well, almost 20 years). I retired from rubygems.org when RubyCentral got crazy in 2024 (and even crazier in 2025 with the mass purge of developers). So, one difference here is that the friend he talks about is using a specific framework. He probably no longer uses ruby nor rails. I use ruby because the language is very well designed and covers (most of my) use cases; the rest I may sprinkle down with java. So whether rails exists or not, makes zero difference to me. Actually without rails it would be better, because people using ruby would be using it because of ... ruby. Even if there are then fewer users. I still think this is better than those who will jump ship anyway because they only use ruby due to rails. These guys are not like in the same boat. They have use cases for getting work done via rails, designing websites, infrastructure related to websites, user-interaction and so forth. But they don't really use ruby as such. Their use case is quite limited. I think this is one of the biggest problems here. It in part explains why ruby dropped down a lot (there are many reasons for this, python being so successful is in my opinion the biggest reason, but the other smaller reasons also add up - that also includes the laughable joke that is documentation in the whole ruby ecosystem. That's inexcusable - note, I am not saying documentation must be perfect, but please look at opal, ruby-wasm or rack - the documentation there is virtually NOT EXISTING.) > The vast majority of programmers are non-experts, like himself No, I think he is an expert - just in a specific niche and field. Not all experts know everything equally well. > Subtle language features like first-class functions, and object systems, are lost on them because they don't really use them anyway. I don't think this is true. Some language features are very useful. Ruby's blocks for instance. They are probably one of the top three win-win features ruby offers. > Computer scientists should really be spending their time developing new libraries rather than inventing new programming languages. I also disagree here. I would, however had, say, that new languages should be well-designed. Many new languages suck. Old languages also suck. Designing a great language is very hard. If it is just a toy or research language then this is fine, but once a language is meant to be "real", it really needs to have compelling use cases and be great in many areas including documentation. > These features are simply not available in all other languages. Java's meta-programming features, for example, are just not powerful enough to implement a system like ActiveRecords. Rails is only possible because of Ruby. That's also incorrect. You can create any DSL as you like in Java too. Ruby just makes this a lot easier out of the box. Plus, you can also have great websites without rails. > Ruby on Rails was designed to make it possible to build websites without understanding type theory, or memory management, or object-oriented design patterns. Ok so ... why would this not be possible in Java? Why would he have to write Java code for a library to be used in this regard? > Ruby on Rails provides a concise way for expressing: do this when the button is clicked But you have the same in many other languages and frameworks too. I mean this is how PHP was started initially. > The "do this" part is implemented in Ruby as a first-class function. How would it be implemented in languages like Java which don't support them? Write a solid DSL. > The programming language directly shapes the design of its libraries. If this were true, why would GTK have glib+vala? I mean, they could just rely on C directly, right? Besides, ruby is just a wrapper over C really. > The more powerful the language, the easier the libraries are to use. That part is true. A better designed language makes for better libraries or a chance to have better libraries. I noticed this when I compared my PHP code to my ruby code. I am not a good programmer, but my ruby code is much better on every level than the equivalent PHP code. Fewer lines too. While this also has to do with experience, at the end of the day PHP is simply a much worse language than Ruby is. At some point I decided I don't want to invest into languages that suck when I could be using better languages instead. That is also why I stopped writing shell scripts - it is just a waste of time having them. Rails is also, by the way, fairly well documented. So I am not saying all in ruby has horrible documentation of course.
librasteve 10mo ago
Well, maybe. The problem is that mature languages and ecosystems are mature and new features have to be shoehorned in. Raku (https://raku.org https://raku.org) on the other hand is intentionally designed as a braid of sub languages (slangs) for quoting, regex, PEG, etc and you can easily make your own slang with eg. https://raku.land/zef:lizmat/Slangify https://raku.land/zef:lizmat/Slangify so you get your DSL as a drop down language in a general PL setting.
- jolt42 10mo ago
  There's so many languages out there, I reject Raku out-of-hand simply since IMO the type should follow the variable name.
  - librasteve 10mo ago
    hmmm Raku is C style int number; … you choose Pascal style number : Integer;
    - jolt42 10mo ago
      Very good, I wrote Pascal many years ago, but I was thinking more Kotlin/Scala (right?) vs Java.
  - lizmat 10mo ago
    You mean like: my $a of Int = 42; say $a; # 42 or my $a of Int = "foo";' # Type check failed in assignment to $a; expected Int but got Str ("foo") ?
zcw100 10mo ago
I just came across a situation where I had a DSL but it was clear that a language would have been better. What I don't like about this is the dogmatic tone which is pretty common in IT. Don't to it that way, do it my way! Sometimes a DSL is a solid choice, sometimes a language is a better one, sometimes you might want to support both but I guess "Choose the right abstraction for your domain" doesn't make for a clickbait title.
- xnorswap 10mo ago
  It's not clear what you're trying to say, because the "L" in DSL is "Language".
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    All programming languages are domain specific, so presumably he is referring to English (or another natural language of the same nature). Meaning that he must be saying that sometimes letting the vibes flow is best.
    - zcw100 10mo ago
      No, I meant a General Purpose Language (GPL) or actually this was an application specific language. You don't need to be so pedantic. Yes, the L is for language but the idea of a DSL is not well defined but these remarks reinforce my argument that people are too dogmatic.
      - xnorswap 10mo ago
        I wasn't trying to be dogmatic, I was genuinely trying to understand what you were trying to say, because it didn't seem to relate to languages vs libraries, and I found it confusing.
eklavya 10mo ago
I don't know ruby or rails so probably wrong on this but why does the author say no framework for Java web. How different is Spring from that? They talk about the programmer which doesn't know neither cares about the language stuff. So what is Spring lacking from that perspective?
- DonHopkins 10mo ago
  "Java is a DSL for taking large XML files and converting them to stack traces" "XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it."
  - moffkalast 10mo ago
    XML is like a flyer saying "do violence" maybe, it doesn't do anything by itself.
    - DonHopkins 10mo ago
      [flagged]
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dominicrose 10mo ago
Rails wouldn't exist without Ruby, Ruby wouldn't exist without C, Rails can't be rewritten in C, Rails isn't a library. But aren't Rails, Laravel and Django a bit similar? At least for the people not directly involved in coding.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- 9rx 10mo ago
  > Rails can't be rewritten in C It could if you added message passing to C. Which we have, and DHH admits that Rails took directly from that. Rails is (loosely) a rewrite of what was originally written in C [with extensions].
  - kristianp 10mo ago
    > Rails is (loosely) a rewrite of what was originally written in C [with extensions]. Are you talking about WebObjects, which was written in Objective-C? (1) If so your comment is somewhat tangential to the truth. (1 2104) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8765009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8765009
rors 10mo ago
I was big fan of Scala a decade ago. The idea of a “scalable language” where DSLs could be built within the type system seemed super powerful. I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM. I’m hoping more recent developments, like WASM or Graal, provide a route for more flexibility when selecting languages. It’s nice to see Rust slowly become a serious choice for web development. Most of the time JS is fine, but it’s good to have the option to pull out a stricter low-level language when needed.
- vjerancrnjak 10mo ago
  Haskell is usually used as a DSL. I believe Haxl is used at Meta and TidalCycles is a good example of another DSL built in Haskell. Although I agree the usual lens, optics, machines, pipes or other higher kinded libs are completely unnecessary, solving problems you do not want to have and have dire performance implications, but are at least correct and allow you to throw code at problems quickly, even though that code sucks in all ways except correctness.
  - antonvs 10mo ago
    I don’t agree that pipes should be in your list, at least for some use cases. Streaming data through pipes gives capabilities that systems written in more traditional ways often simply don’t match. Look at the use of the Stream API in Java for an example of the utility of this outside of the Haskell context. Pipes also don’t necessarily have “dire performance implications”, but it depends a lot on the implementation. Haskell libraries don’t always emphasize real world performance as a top criterion. E.g. see https://github.com/composewell/streaming-benchmarks https://github.com/composewell/streaming-benchmarks for some truly wild variations in performance across libraries (disclaimer: I haven’t investigated or verified those numbers.)
- sambuccid 10mo ago
  I recently started to learn Scala and I love it, also for it's functional aspect. Regarding your comment, it feels like scala is generic enough to be used also in other ways, and definitively for DSLs. What do you think it's missing?
duesabati 10mo ago
I completely disagree with the post. All programming languages are equivalent meaning their level of expressiveness is the same, it's not an opinion it's a fact. Each language comes with its runtime and its peculiarities but potentially you can always make any feature that another language runtime has with any language, even though probably not with the same performance and efficiency has been that feature native to the runtime itself. So there are no "more powerful languages" just runtimes that allow you to hide away some stuff considered stable enough that they become some kind of primitive for the programmer, now we may have different opinions on what elegant code is, but personally I'd like to avoid code that directly (i.e. no kind of abstraction) relies on runtime features and instead express clearly my intention in code, but I recognize the productivity gains.
- Verdex 10mo ago
  You may be thinking of turing completeness. All turing complete languages can compute the same functions. And in that way they are equivalent. However, not all languages are turing complete. See, for example, charity: https://github.com/dobesv/charity https://github.com/dobesv/charity Furthermore, turing completeness says nothing about expressiveness or capability. Imagine a language that has no IO. Such a language would be able to compute any function any other language can but not do anything viewable by the rest of the world. So obviously not equivalent. And w.r.t. expressiveness, there is some academic research into how to quantify that: https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/scp91-felleisen.pdf https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/scp91-felleisen.pdf
  - duesabati 10mo ago
    I understand and agree, what I was trying to say is that one should not confine ones thinking by the constraints of a tool, would it be a programming language or whole framework, but to express everything as freely as possible without details of implementation only then one can go deeper and add concreteness that brings its set of constraints and all of this should be possible in any programming languages. I hope I've cleared my standpoint.
- patrickmay 10mo ago
jmmcd 10mo ago
The best example of all is Prolog. It is always held up as the paradigmatic representative of logic programming, a rare language paradigm. But it doesn't need to be a language. It is really a collection of algorithms which should be a library in every language, together with a nice convention for expressing Prolog things in that language's syntax. (My comment is slightly off-topic to the article but on-topic to the title.)
- bwestergard 10mo ago
  Are there any particularly excellent examples of prolog implemented as a library you could point us to?
  - chii 10mo ago
    not OP, but for clojure : https://github.com/bobschrag/clolog https://github.com/bobschrag/clolog
  - khaled_ismaeel 10mo ago
    Not exactly prolog, but logic programming implemented as a library/DSL: https://minikanren.org/ https://minikanren.org/
    - jayd16 10mo ago
      If it's a DSL then it's "writing a new language" and you're just calling from a native API, no?
      - naasking 10mo ago
        Embedded DSLs are libraries. They are the epitome of the advice to write a library. It just so happens that the library abstractions could map to a language if you wanted to add parsing and all of the other machinery.
    - EricRiese 10mo ago
      Clojure's core.logic is based on minikanren, so that fits the bill.
vhantz 10mo ago
> Stanza provides an optional type system, garbage collection, and a multimethod based object system. But if you don't like Stanza's object system, there is no way to write your own. This is one of the main directions of programming language research. Can we design a language so expressive that library writers can easily write the most appropriate object system, or most appropriate type system, to fit their application? Perhaps one day we'll have such a language. We already have it. It's an obscure little language called C++. Tise interested in those kinds of extensions to a language should look into Herb Sutter's experiments with cppfront: https://hsutter.github.io/cppfront/welcome/overview/ https://hsutter.github.io/cppfront/welcome/overview/
- lelanthran 10mo ago
  C++ is most definitely not it. Lisp is what you are after if you want to include some object system as a library, or a new type of switch statement as a library or a new kind of if statement as a library. C++ can do none of that.
  - AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
    C++ can do some of that. Let's say I want an if statement that takes an integer and three blocks of code. It executes the first block if the integer is less than zero, the second if it is zero, and the third if it is positive. OK, if you squint enough that by "block of code" you mean closure, or function object, then I can write that in C++. I can make the if statement a free-standing function (that is, not a member of a class), and add it to any library I wish. Now, you can say that it's going to be tedious to use that, because you have to set up three closures every time you want to call this "super if". And you'd be right, but that's a different argument.
    - philipallstar 10mo ago
      How can you declare new syntax in C++? Wouldn't it just be a function call?
      - 10mo ago
css_apologist 10mo ago
> Are Java developers just not as competent as Ruby programmers? years ago a senior developer close to me said "when screening interviews, if i see rails i throw the resume in the trash" so ironic how trivial/stupid these language-based judgements are
- unkulunkulu 10mo ago
  I couple of years ago I would ask to collect your coworker’s garbage bin :) Not as easy to find in my vicinity, at least good ones, which is of course true for any language and profession in general. I have RoR on my resume and very fond of it.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > years ago a senior developer close to me said What was the senior's stack?
  - oompydoompy74 10mo ago
    I’m going to assume Google Docs.
- madmountaingoat 10mo ago
  One side of my brain agrees that's a dumb way to judge anyone but then when I think about the accepted filtering mechanism they really aren't any better or any worse. You cannot interview everyone and ultimately you're looking for some combination of competence, alignment, drive and social fit. Filtering on where you worked previously or where you went to school or whether you can pass some coding challenge only partially fills in the matrix. And the size and shape of the organization can drive how much people in the hiring loop look at each data point. This senior engineer's ideal for alignment and social fit probably favored people who think like them or their department's head.
- 725686 10mo ago
  If one is looking for Java developers, it only makes sense to throw rails resumes in the trash. It will save time for both parties.
patrickmay 10mo ago
> Can we design a language so expressive that library writers can easily write the most appropriate object system, or most appropriate type system, to fit their application? Why yes, it can and has been done: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/ECOOP.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/ECOOP.pdf
unkulunkulu 10mo ago
For me the title is a bit of a contradiction: I always think about the library as “the final language”. So author’s example of RoR/Ruby is “RoR is a great web service language that uses Ruby as the base, they evolved together and arguably as RoR is the main source of clients for ruby, ruby was as well designed for RoR as RoR for ruby” I think about programming/design as languages/translation in a lot of ways: its languages all the way down.
- oaiey 10mo ago
  I agree. c# and asp.net core also co-developed. Interestingly in both direction, towards users (tons of type inference, removing boilerplate, ...) and system (writing highly optimized web servers with low level paradigms)
- deleted 10mo ago
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kayo_20211030 10mo ago
Any language/library needs to communicate in two directions: to the machine and to the people. At the micro-level, machines work with bits, or voltages, or whatever. That's a technological problem, not easy, but tractable in a mechanical sense. People, on the other hand, work with ideas, metaphors, expressions of intent, etc. If a language/library makes the communication of those things easier/better/faster; if it can be "written down" clearly, and "read" clearly by a person, then does it really matter into which taxonomic category it fits? We pick horses for courses. That seems about right. If Rails works for you, is complementary with what you want to achieve, is an accelerator, and is generally well-understood by the people with whom you work, then use it. Alternatively, if the answer to all the previous is Stanza then go with that. There's less "right" and "wrong" in those decisions than there is "advance", or "struggle". It sounds trite. But, use what works. If something doesn't work make something that does, iff that's the most efficient approach.
igt0 10mo ago
Logic systems are a good place where the library first approach tends to work well: you keep a small, boring core (the inference engine), and let people extend it with predicates, rules/operators, and domain packages. I’ve been experimenting with a small defeasible-logic core (argumentation semantics + priorities + conflict detection) that stays stable, while most of the real meaning lives in extension points. https://github.com/canto-lang/canto-lang https://github.com/canto-lang/canto-lang
morshu9001 10mo ago
"The more powerful the language, the easier the libraries are to use." for anyone thinking of reading the title without the body It's true, you couldn't really do Express in Java, at least not back then.
- newsoftheday 10mo ago
  I don't understand, what's Express? As for libraries and Java, I'd argue Java became a well established enterprise language and platform exactly because it makes such highly effective use of libraries.
  - morshu9001 10mo ago
    It's the NodeJS webserver
- oaiey 10mo ago
  See C#'s asp.net core minimal apis (a express clone). So it is definitely possible but you need to co-develop the language. I think as you point out.
- didip 10mo ago
  It’s possible to have something like Express, take a look at Javalin. But Java problem is not the mechanics, it’s that the community doesn’t want nice things.
  - morshu9001 10mo ago
    Kinda now that Java has lambdas, but still async in that disn't work as easily as JS, which is important. This is only recently starting to change with Project Loom.
  - brabel 10mo ago
    Javalin was inspired by https://sparkjava.com/ https://sparkjava.com/ which was inspired by Sinatra (which I think also inspired Express?). Anyway, libraries like this were only really feasible after Java 8 because of the reliance on lambdas. Having to instantiate anonymous nested classes for every "function" was a total pain before that.
agumonkey 10mo ago
it's strange cause for some devs (lispers, smalltalkers, forth..ists), the language is the core, and any concept is to become a generic linguistic trait (and everything will be build by composing expressions with these traits). yet at the same time, clojurists love the idea of doing lots of dsl libraries..
rambambram 10mo ago
There is a good web framework for C. It's called PHP. ;)
- oaiey 10mo ago
  I think you stretch this library thought a bit too far :)
defactor 10mo ago
Java has Grails web framework. We have designed apps with 75% less resources and time compared to Spring at a big enterprise. But most devs wanted springboot.
- newsoftheday 10mo ago
  Grails requires Groovy, though you can integrate Java classes into a grails app. Now that we can develop script style with Java 21, I'd like to see something like Grails that worked with Java only...that would be a fun way to develop web apps. I liked Grails, just not Groovy.
sriku 10mo ago
This looks to me like partly a false dichotomy. We can design languages and write libraries. Some would even argue that some kinds of "libraries" could be viewed as languages themselves, as much as some languages might as well have been written as libraries in another language. Also often, the language doesn't live isolated from its implementation (compiler or interpreter). While theory looks at languages via its semantics, in practice as the OP notes it is about the quality of the implementation and what can be reasonably done with the language. A recent [1] case is Julia. I think it has hit a kind of sweet spot for language design where new performant code tends to get written in Julia rather than in some other language and bound to it. At its core, it is a simple "call functions, passing data in and getting results out" kind of language, but what the functions ("methods") mean and how the compiler does just-ahead-of-time compilation with deep type specialized code means you can write high level code that optimizes very well. Those mechanics operate under the hood though, which makes for a pleasant programming experience ... and there are loads of cutting edge packages being written in Julia. It is less interesting to look at Julia as "just the language". [1] recent in programming languages is perhaps anything <= 15 years? .. because it takes time to discover a language's potential.
- jonny_eh 10mo ago
  > This looks to me like partly a false dichotomy Wasn't that the point of the article? That you need both?
  - Jtsummers 10mo ago
    Yes, but most of the commenters didn't read the article.
    - jonny_eh 10mo ago
      Yup, articles like this where the title is the opposite of the article's message is a trap to reveal that.
dieggsy 10mo ago
I think I mostly agree with the thesis here, but I actually liked the point in the title at face value, too. We need both, I think. I guess I'll be another annoying Lisp guy, but: > At this point, the right question to ask would be, well can you write a static-typing library for Scheme that then automatically checks your code for type errors? And the current answer, for now and for the foreseeable future, is no. No mainstream language today allows you to write a library to extend its type system. The author seems to provide a counter example themselves(?): > Racket and Shen provide mechanisms for extending their type systems... I wonder if this is as clear-cut as the author is making it out to be. Coalton, which is effectively a library (and language) for Common Lisp, seems like it basically does this. Maybe that's not exactly what the author is referring to, because it is essentially a new language on top of Lisp using its meta-programming facilities, as opposed to merely extending the type system. Still, it can be used as a library right alongside Lisp code, so I think it's in the same spirit of of the first question of writing a "static-typing library that automatically checks your code" in a dynamic language. Standard scheme may or may not be able to do this, but most Scheme implementations have unhygienic macros like CL's too, so I'd assume something similar would be possible. The fact that that these tend to be extensions from implementation designers might align with the article's point though. Also somewhat to the author's point, Coalton does rely strongly on CL's underlying type system, for which there's no real equivalent in Scheme. It also relies on implementation-specific optimizations alongside that. For what it's worth you can (and indeed people have) written object systems in Scheme, despite the language not having one, though they tend not to be performant, which is likely another point towards using/writing a different language. CL also tends to allow fairly deep extension of its object system through the Meta-object Protocol. I guess my point is that in my (probably biased) opinion, Lisps, or other languages with very strong meta-programming facilities, are pretty close to the language longed for in "Perhaps one day we'll have such a language." They aren't a silver bullet, of course. CL has no easy way to write performant coroutines/continuations, for example, even given all its extensibility. Scheme has no real type system, etc. etc. I don't think any of this invalidates the articles points, I'm just not sure I agree with the absolutes.
bluGill 10mo ago
Languages are "Easy" to design. There is nothing wrong designing a new language and it can be fun. There is however something wrong with releasing your new language! In most cases you should show it off to close friends, or your professor, and then burn it and all the source. Sure you might be better than the current language, but you won't be enough better as to be worth it. (even if the language is notoriously bad C++ where it is easy to be better - you won't be enough better as to be worth it). If you want a better language there are two good options: switch to a different one that already exists; or make your language better. There are lots of great choices for languages out there if you want to switch. If the language you are thinking of doesn't have an active community of people working on making it better, it probably isn't a good choice. Whichever language you choose though, libraries are the hard part. There are a lot of bad libraries, we need someone to write a better one - but only if one doesn't exist! For the great libraries out there, most need someone to contribute. A large part of libraries is the consistent interface. Often there is a great libFoo and libBar, but their APIs are not consistent and so we need a libBarWithFooStyleInterface, and/or libFooWithBarStyleInterface. Better yet, we need everyone to come together and agree on how the interface should be and then make both use that new standard - cleaning Augean stables with a toothbrush seems like an easier task. Of course in the real world there a hundreds of libraries each with a great interface that is not consistent with the others.
- zabzonk 10mo ago
  > then burn it and all the source Nah, don't do that. You will enjoy looking back at it in your old age. I wish I had all my old code now.
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    fare enough. So long as you don't inflict it on the world as something they might really use it is fine.
newsoftheday 10mo ago
The article seems to vibe railing against Java.
- ActorNightly 10mo ago
  Nothing wrong with that. Log4shell should have been the end of everyone using Java.
  - pjmlp 10mo ago
    There is this little mobile phone platform out there.
    - ActorNightly 10mo ago
      It has moved to Kotlin, which is what Java should be. With a custom VM. And even now, Google is moving to Fuschia which is Dart based.
      - pjmlp 10mo ago
        Nope, it is still Java, Kotlin is only the JetPack libraries. https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture Also Koltin is meaningless without Java Virtual Machine, which is used to power most of Koltin existence[0], Gradle, Android Studio, thus the Android team keeps updating the Java support so that they don't lose access to the most used versions in Maven Central. [0] - Kotlin Native and Kotlin Javascript are quite poor in available libraries
Arch-TK 10mo ago
The problem is really that sometimes making something feel ergonomic in a language can be a pain. Although that in itself might be a hint to change language and write your library there, instead of inventing a new one.
taylorallred 10mo ago
I agree with the sentiment of this article but the question that fascinates me is "when do you need a language feature instead of a library in order to accomplish X, Y, or Z?"
- oaiey 10mo ago
  Well there are really bad languages. Like ABAP or SQL. But even in higher languages like Java, you sometimes loose expressiveness
6510 10mo ago
Libraries and languages are not actually about syntax or function. They are communities first. They each have a community of users and one of developers. Depending on their application they each attract very different people - which is wonderful. The work matters too of course. Frequently used functions should be categorically bagged into libs and if the lib is used often enough some of it's functionality should be baked into the language. If languages require something often enough the language layer above should provide it and if things are frequently needed close to the metal it should be baked in hardware. Possibly as a co-processor and then as part of the cpu. We should even have a similar process moving things in the other direction. I cant wait for the day when floating-point arithmetic becomes a library complete with a community of people who still think it's wonderful. Like a football channel to cleanly contain that kind of undesirable materials. Some libraries/modules/frameworks should also be replaced by competent developers. We don't want a leftpad community.
NoGravitas 10mo ago
Of course, in Lisp, you can implement language features as libraries, which kind of undercuts the point of this article.
kazinator 10mo ago
> In summary, the purpose of a general-purpose programming language is to enable the creation of powerful and easy-to-use libraries. Close! The purpose of a general-purpose programming language is to enable the creation of powerful and easy-to-use languages, but often just libraries.
vivzkestrel 10mo ago
- i need a language that looks like typed python - and runs 50 times faster than c, c++, rust and zig - comes with a standard library covering 50000 use cases - has direct integrations with drivers to every major database, crm, analytics provider, key value store, queue systems
CyberDildonics 10mo ago
Lots of languages could just be implemented with classes in C++. Every "probabilistic language" could just be types that interact with each other properly.
bmc7505 10mo ago
There are a few approaches if you want to write a new language. One, as the author argues, is to write a library in an existing language, which may require sacrificing ergonomics to fit inside the syntax of the host language, but is safe, modular and reusable. Many DSLs can be bolted onto an existing language with support for compiler extensions. This approach offers more flexibility, but often leads to fragmentation and poor interoperability in the language ecosystem. There is third approach, established by a group in Minnesota [1], which is to design languages and tools which are modular and extensible from the get-go, so that extensions are more interoperable. They do research on how to make this work using attribute grammars. If the host language has a sufficiently expressive type system, you can often get away with writing a fluent API [2] or type safe embedded DSL. But designing languages and type systems with good support for meta-programming is also an active area of research. [3, 4] If none of these options work, the last resort is to start from tabula rasa and write your own parser, compiler, and developer tools. This offers the most flexibility, but requires an enormous amount of engineering, and generally is not recommended in 2026. [1]: https://melt.cs.umn.edu https://melt.cs.umn.edu [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.01473 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.01473 [3]: https://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kam/papers/aplas2016.pdf https://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kam/papers/aplas2016.pdf [4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.17065 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.17065
- GZGavinZhao 10mo ago
  > There is third approach, established by a group in Minnesota [1], which is to design languages and tools which are modular and extensible from the get-go, so that extensions are more interoperable. They do research on how to make this work using attribute grammars. MLIR [1] has entered the chat :P I know I know MLIR is an IR and not a programming language, but MLIR does give me the feeling of "an IR to rule them all" (as long as you're ok with SSA representation), and the IR itself is quite high-level to the point it almost feels like an actual programming language, e.g. you can write a MLIR program that compiles to C using the EmitC dialect that feels a lot like writing C. [1]: https://mlir.llvm.org https://mlir.llvm.org
  - pjmlp 10mo ago
    Well some languages, like Mojo, expose MLIR directly in the language as intrisics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21039 https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21039
tjchear 10mo ago
The author makes a good point about language capabilities enabling certain libraries to be written, just as DSL makes it easier to reason about problems and implement solutions with the right kind of abstractions and language ergonomics (usually at the expense of expressivity and flexibility). There’s a time in my life where I designed languages and wrote compilers. One type of language I’ve always thought about that could be made more approachable to non technical users is an outline-liked language with English like syntaxes and being a DSL, the shape of the outline would be very much fixed and on a guardrail, and can’t express arbitrary instructions like normal programming languages, but an escape hatch (to more expressive language) for advanced users can be provided. An area where this DSL can be used would be common portal admin app generation and workflow automation. That said, with the advent of AI assistants, I’m not sure if there is still room for my DSL idea.
- whattheheckheck 10mo ago
  I mean that's Zapier or n8n?
hulitu 10mo ago
> “Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016) It looks that somebody listened. We now have 3 GTK libraries in a system, a lot of graphics libraries (cairo, etc) 3d libraries (Mesa, vulkan). It is a mess.
noreplydev 10mo ago
i think that languages is are for worlds and libraries are for adding ships, planes and cars to that worlds, enabling those worlds itself. the key is that not all worlds enable the same kinds of libraries.
OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
I have to disagree about the author's described purpose of programming languages. PLs exist to provide elegant expression to a curated subset of ways of expressing solutions to problems. At the extremes, we call these paradigms. Functional languages, Object Oriented languages, Array languages, etc. But every language exists to make some subset of "shapes" of solutions easier to read and write. Elixir encourages you to describe your programs as a distributed system of programs each running a series of transformations to data, thanks to its pipeline system, and to push your branching to function-call level with its pattern-matching multiple dispatch. Java encourages you to write your application as a collection of things, that know stuff and do stuff, including telling other things to do stuff based on things they know. C and Go encourage you to write your programs as an ordered series of atomic tasks for the computer to complete. SQL has you describe what you want your output to look like. Etc, etc. There are inherent trade offs between languages, because what you make inelegant to express or even inexpressible carries value, too.
scoofy 10mo ago
As a student of philosophy of language, I obviously agree with the author (against the quoted thesis). The structure of a language matters to the ease and feel of its use, despite even being logically identical. One parallel would be the syntactic benefits of something like Hintikka’s independence-friendly logic vs first order logic, even if they are equivalent. The sentiment shared is that we should sacrifice benefits to the next generation to make our own lives easier. This is a common sentiment, but a sad one. The goal should be a natural language based programming language, that everyone can use, along side a technical programming language that makes unambiguous the interface between the language and the machine. Everyone seems to endorse their happy medium, and those languages are also perfectly fine.
butterisgood 10mo ago
I think this thinking makes sense if you've not used enough programming languages pragmatically. But, if you squint, great API design is a bit like embedded domain specific language design as well. I think there's room for both.
ninalanyon 10mo ago
I'd say that the best thing ever would be an easy way to call a library written in xxx from a program written in yyyy. There are lots of libraries already. Instead of rewriting them in every language why make them available to every language. Yes, I know it would be difficult and in some cases impossible.
fithisux 10mo ago
Julia got it right with its macro system. You can write embedded DSLs easily.
- wolvesechoes 10mo ago
  But they are still worse experience that dedicated, separate languages. Compare ModelingToolkit.jl with Modelica (ok, there are some differences in capacilities, but just compare how better is to express models in Modelica).
  - fithisux 10mo ago
    DSL is always better until you need to grow an ecosystem around it. If you can, go down the DSL path, otherwise use embedded DSL. If you can, go down the embedded DSL path otherwise use a library.

279 points by teleforce 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

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whazor 10mo ago

With a Domain Specific Language (DSL), you parse code and build an abstract syntax tree. But you can also build a Python library where you construct the same tree. With the benefit that LLMs are already better trained on Python code. If you need a deterministic programming language, you could use starlark.

conartist6 10mo ago
DSL is a term with such fuzzy meaning, I don't like it at all. It's always valid to just say "language". Languages and libraries don't even have to be opposing concepts either. Let's say you write the first ever JSON parsing library. Did you just create a library? Or a language?
- librasteve 10mo ago
  I have started gathering DSL specific content over on https://reddit.com/r/domainspecificlangs https://reddit.com/r/domainspecificlangs … there are several definitions over there. Personally I would distinguish between a drop down DSL and a full blown independent language.
- morshu9001 10mo ago
  Doesn't seem fuzzy to me. JSON parser is a lib.
- whazor 9mo ago
  A language is normally defined by a grammar and can be parsed. The definition can be very formal. Alternatively a library is a construct in a pre-existing programming language. For example in Python you pip install a package, import some classes and functions. But where these concepts can overlap is that you could define your domain logic as a language, or by calling functions in a library. In the past, I was a big believer in domain specific languages. However, AI will outperform when generating Python code with using a new library.

xigoi 10mo ago

The quotation marks having been stripped from the title changes the meaning quite a bit…

pfdietz 10mo ago
I admit the article is not what I at first expected. But I liked it. The references to Ruby feel dated, though.

tonyg 10mo ago

I will not. I refuse

imadierich 10mo ago
[dead]

conartist6 10mo ago

Yes! This is also why I think it's stupid that languages are now trying to kill their most popular libraries as a matter of principle. E.g. node says "oh no, you need a library to write tests!" and now that means that you have to have a testing framework built into your runtime. And of course it's just another library, really, that competes with the original one, but this one is blessed with standards so it has a monopolistic advantage that will deter further innovation.

wiseowise 10mo ago
> And of course it's just another library, really, that competes with the original one, but this one is blessed with standards so it has a monopolistic advantage that will deter further innovation. It's called convenience. You're free to create a testing library so good that it'll knock socks off the stdlib one.
- conartist6 10mo ago
  My question is so simple: why is a level playing field seen as bad now? Have we given up on having a market economy? You can't have a fair game when one team playing is also the referee. Yet everywhere I look that's the way of it. Apple runs the app store so that they can also ensures that every successful app is theirs. The supermarket stocks the shelves, but also uses their position of power to kill successful independent brands. Node takes libraries which have taken years of work and shits out builtins with at most a week invested. I think it's a national embarrassment: anticompetition to the point of communism held up as if it were the genuine spirit of the American Dream.
  - Jtsummers 10mo ago
    > Node takes libraries which have taken years of work and shits out builtins with at most a week invested. > I think it's a national embarrassment: anticompetition to the point of communism held up as if it were the genuine spirit of the American Dream. You think including a testing library in a language implementation or standard tooling is tantamount to communism?

CPLX 10mo ago

I know that HN is famously a discussion forum where users comment based on the titles of submitted articles, rather than their content. With that said, the divergence in comments on this very insightful and well written article will soon provide an unusually clear means of determining who is commenting on the title and who is commenting on the article.

fredrikholm 10mo ago
The omission of quotations in the title triggered my Lisp-damaged brain to man the walls, only to immediately be met with Ruby and Scheme examples. False alarm.
tialaramex 10mo ago
That's fair. It's also the case that to some extent HN's article titles serve the same purpose as that one line description in a speed dating event. They're ice breakers, everybody has the same prompt and then writes about that, and even if they did read the article which I agree often they don't, they come at it from a different angle. I feel similarly to the article author, it is trivially true that we could express anything in all the general purpose languages, that's what general purpose even means, but I find for Computer Languages the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis checks out pretty well. The language changes how you think about the problem.
- CPLX 10mo ago
  As a long-time HN contributor, I believe in visualizing myself like water flowing downhill. As such, I certainly would never try to overturn the prevailing culture of commenting on article titles and in fact engaging in it myself from time to time.

jll29 10mo ago

The OP's point is well-taken: a new language usually forces you to change 100% of your environment and tooling, whereas a new library respects your habits and preferences. I follow new language developments with keen interest, but few of them will ever reach the level of maturity to be considered serious candidates for adoption. It's also risky to adopt a language that you cannot easily hire developers for, for example. Libraries are great, but there is only so much they can address, and that depends on the language, too, as the article correctly points out. And there are two kinds of libries: tool libraries and frameworks. Someone once said it nicely: "Frameworks are like Hollywood - 'You don't call us, we call you!'". Frameworks often require you to submit to their control flow rather the other way round; that's why I prefer tool libraries.

kayo_20211030 10mo ago
Agree. I don't know why a statement that uncontroversial got the bums rush.

dev_l1x_be 10mo ago

I would love to have a scripting language has typed features and you can replace bash with. What comes close is: #! /usr/bin/env elixir Mix.install([:jason]) defmodule JsonPrettyPrinter do def get_stdin_data do :stdio |> IO.read(:all) |> Jason.decode() |> case do {:ok, json_data} -> json_data _ -> raise "Invalid JSON payload was provided" end end end JsonPrettyPrinter.get_stdin_data() |> JsonPrettyPrinter.pretty_print_json() |> IO.puts()

PaulHoule 10mo ago
Two interesting options for everyday scripting are Python and Powershell.
- b40d-48b2-979e 10mo ago
  A nice part of PowerShell: you can `Add-Type` and embed C#/F# when you want.
- logicallee 10mo ago
  you won't believe how powerful Python is with libraries. ChatGPT and Claude made a brand new browser, that isn't based on Chromium or Firefox, and yet still follows many aspects of layout correctly. I read the article we're discussing ("stop designing languages") on this browser and I'm currently using it to post this reply.
  - F3nd0 10mo ago
    Knowing that LLM’s have been extensively trained on public code, I wonder how much of it is based on Chromium or Firefox.
    - logicallee 10mo ago
      That's a good question! You can read through the entire source code for the latest version: https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/171toy-browser.py.txt https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/171toy-browser.py.t... it doesn't look like it would be easily derived from Chromium or Firefox, because this code is Python and those don't use Python this way. By the way is there any feature you'd like to see added to the toy browser? The goal is that one day it's a replacement for Chrome, Firefox, etc. It's being built by ChatGPT and Claude at the moment. Let me know if there are any feature ideas you have that would be cool to add.

shevy-java 10mo ago

> But thanks to Ruby on Rails, he doesn't have to! So he said that he has no particular opinion about the Ruby programming language, but he absolutely loves Rails. Ruby got a hype phase with regards to rails. It then dropped. A lot. TIOBE, while it is in general crap, is somewhat accurate when you plot things over time: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ruby/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ruby/ So, ruby peaked with rails between 2006 to 2009 or so, give or take. Then the decline phase set in, and now it is unfortunately also crawling behind perl into extinction. This is very unfortunate - I still use ruby almost daily as the ultimate glue language. But this can not be denied now that ruby is following the extinction path perl already had going some years before. I was using ruby before rails was created and ruby covers all my web-needs. I had a web-framework in PHP, used it for about three years, ported it into ruby and expanded it massively in the last 20 years or so (well, almost 20 years). I retired from rubygems.org when RubyCentral got crazy in 2024 (and even crazier in 2025 with the mass purge of developers). So, one difference here is that the friend he talks about is using a specific framework. He probably no longer uses ruby nor rails. I use ruby because the language is very well designed and covers (most of my) use cases; the rest I may sprinkle down with java. So whether rails exists or not, makes zero difference to me. Actually without rails it would be better, because people using ruby would be using it because of ... ruby. Even if there are then fewer users. I still think this is better than those who will jump ship anyway because they only use ruby due to rails. These guys are not like in the same boat. They have use cases for getting work done via rails, designing websites, infrastructure related to websites, user-interaction and so forth. But they don't really use ruby as such. Their use case is quite limited. I think this is one of the biggest problems here. It in part explains why ruby dropped down a lot (there are many reasons for this, python being so successful is in my opinion the biggest reason, but the other smaller reasons also add up - that also includes the laughable joke that is documentation in the whole ruby ecosystem. That's inexcusable - note, I am not saying documentation must be perfect, but please look at opal, ruby-wasm or rack - the documentation there is virtually NOT EXISTING.) > The vast majority of programmers are non-experts, like himself No, I think he is an expert - just in a specific niche and field. Not all experts know everything equally well. > Subtle language features like first-class functions, and object systems, are lost on them because they don't really use them anyway. I don't think this is true. Some language features are very useful. Ruby's blocks for instance. They are probably one of the top three win-win features ruby offers. > Computer scientists should really be spending their time developing new libraries rather than inventing new programming languages. I also disagree here. I would, however had, say, that new languages should be well-designed. Many new languages suck. Old languages also suck. Designing a great language is very hard. If it is just a toy or research language then this is fine, but once a language is meant to be "real", it really needs to have compelling use cases and be great in many areas including documentation. > These features are simply not available in all other languages. Java's meta-programming features, for example, are just not powerful enough to implement a system like ActiveRecords. Rails is only possible because of Ruby. That's also incorrect. You can create any DSL as you like in Java too. Ruby just makes this a lot easier out of the box. Plus, you can also have great websites without rails. > Ruby on Rails was designed to make it possible to build websites without understanding type theory, or memory management, or object-oriented design patterns. Ok so ... why would this not be possible in Java? Why would he have to write Java code for a library to be used in this regard? > Ruby on Rails provides a concise way for expressing: do this when the button is clicked But you have the same in many other languages and frameworks too. I mean this is how PHP was started initially. > The "do this" part is implemented in Ruby as a first-class function. How would it be implemented in languages like Java which don't support them? Write a solid DSL. > The programming language directly shapes the design of its libraries. If this were true, why would GTK have glib+vala? I mean, they could just rely on C directly, right? Besides, ruby is just a wrapper over C really. > The more powerful the language, the easier the libraries are to use. That part is true. A better designed language makes for better libraries or a chance to have better libraries. I noticed this when I compared my PHP code to my ruby code. I am not a good programmer, but my ruby code is much better on every level than the equivalent PHP code. Fewer lines too. While this also has to do with experience, at the end of the day PHP is simply a much worse language than Ruby is. At some point I decided I don't want to invest into languages that suck when I could be using better languages instead. That is also why I stopped writing shell scripts - it is just a waste of time having them. Rails is also, by the way, fairly well documented. So I am not saying all in ruby has horrible documentation of course.

librasteve 10mo ago

Well, maybe. The problem is that mature languages and ecosystems are mature and new features have to be shoehorned in. Raku (https://raku.org https://raku.org) on the other hand is intentionally designed as a braid of sub languages (slangs) for quoting, regex, PEG, etc and you can easily make your own slang with eg. https://raku.land/zef:lizmat/Slangify https://raku.land/zef:lizmat/Slangify so you get your DSL as a drop down language in a general PL setting.

jolt42 10mo ago
There's so many languages out there, I reject Raku out-of-hand simply since IMO the type should follow the variable name.
- librasteve 10mo ago
  hmmm Raku is C style int number; … you choose Pascal style number : Integer;
  - jolt42 10mo ago
    Very good, I wrote Pascal many years ago, but I was thinking more Kotlin/Scala (right?) vs Java.
- lizmat 10mo ago
  You mean like: my $a of Int = 42; say $a; # 42 or my $a of Int = "foo";' # Type check failed in assignment to $a; expected Int but got Str ("foo") ?

zcw100 10mo ago

I just came across a situation where I had a DSL but it was clear that a language would have been better. What I don't like about this is the dogmatic tone which is pretty common in IT. Don't to it that way, do it my way! Sometimes a DSL is a solid choice, sometimes a language is a better one, sometimes you might want to support both but I guess "Choose the right abstraction for your domain" doesn't make for a clickbait title.

xnorswap 10mo ago
It's not clear what you're trying to say, because the "L" in DSL is "Language".
- 9rx 10mo ago
  All programming languages are domain specific, so presumably he is referring to English (or another natural language of the same nature). Meaning that he must be saying that sometimes letting the vibes flow is best.
  - zcw100 10mo ago
    No, I meant a General Purpose Language (GPL) or actually this was an application specific language. You don't need to be so pedantic. Yes, the L is for language but the idea of a DSL is not well defined but these remarks reinforce my argument that people are too dogmatic.
    - xnorswap 10mo ago
      I wasn't trying to be dogmatic, I was genuinely trying to understand what you were trying to say, because it didn't seem to relate to languages vs libraries, and I found it confusing.

eklavya 10mo ago

I don't know ruby or rails so probably wrong on this but why does the author say no framework for Java web. How different is Spring from that? They talk about the programmer which doesn't know neither cares about the language stuff. So what is Spring lacking from that perspective?

DonHopkins 10mo ago
"Java is a DSL for taking large XML files and converting them to stack traces" "XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it."
- moffkalast 10mo ago
  XML is like a flyer saying "do violence" maybe, it doesn't do anything by itself.
  - DonHopkins 10mo ago
    [flagged]

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

dominicrose 10mo ago

Rails wouldn't exist without Ruby, Ruby wouldn't exist without C, Rails can't be rewritten in C, Rails isn't a library. But aren't Rails, Laravel and Django a bit similar? At least for the people not directly involved in coding.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
9rx 10mo ago
> Rails can't be rewritten in C It could if you added message passing to C. Which we have, and DHH admits that Rails took directly from that. Rails is (loosely) a rewrite of what was originally written in C [with extensions].
- kristianp 10mo ago
  > Rails is (loosely) a rewrite of what was originally written in C [with extensions]. Are you talking about WebObjects, which was written in Objective-C? (1) If so your comment is somewhat tangential to the truth. (1 2104) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8765009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8765009

rors 10mo ago

I was big fan of Scala a decade ago. The idea of a “scalable language” where DSLs could be built within the type system seemed super powerful. I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM. I’m hoping more recent developments, like WASM or Graal, provide a route for more flexibility when selecting languages. It’s nice to see Rust slowly become a serious choice for web development. Most of the time JS is fine, but it’s good to have the option to pull out a stricter low-level language when needed.

vjerancrnjak 10mo ago
Haskell is usually used as a DSL. I believe Haxl is used at Meta and TidalCycles is a good example of another DSL built in Haskell. Although I agree the usual lens, optics, machines, pipes or other higher kinded libs are completely unnecessary, solving problems you do not want to have and have dire performance implications, but are at least correct and allow you to throw code at problems quickly, even though that code sucks in all ways except correctness.
- antonvs 10mo ago
  I don’t agree that pipes should be in your list, at least for some use cases. Streaming data through pipes gives capabilities that systems written in more traditional ways often simply don’t match. Look at the use of the Stream API in Java for an example of the utility of this outside of the Haskell context. Pipes also don’t necessarily have “dire performance implications”, but it depends a lot on the implementation. Haskell libraries don’t always emphasize real world performance as a top criterion. E.g. see https://github.com/composewell/streaming-benchmarks https://github.com/composewell/streaming-benchmarks for some truly wild variations in performance across libraries (disclaimer: I haven’t investigated or verified those numbers.)
sambuccid 10mo ago
I recently started to learn Scala and I love it, also for it's functional aspect. Regarding your comment, it feels like scala is generic enough to be used also in other ways, and definitively for DSLs. What do you think it's missing?

duesabati 10mo ago

I completely disagree with the post. All programming languages are equivalent meaning their level of expressiveness is the same, it's not an opinion it's a fact. Each language comes with its runtime and its peculiarities but potentially you can always make any feature that another language runtime has with any language, even though probably not with the same performance and efficiency has been that feature native to the runtime itself. So there are no "more powerful languages" just runtimes that allow you to hide away some stuff considered stable enough that they become some kind of primitive for the programmer, now we may have different opinions on what elegant code is, but personally I'd like to avoid code that directly (i.e. no kind of abstraction) relies on runtime features and instead express clearly my intention in code, but I recognize the productivity gains.

Verdex 10mo ago
You may be thinking of turing completeness. All turing complete languages can compute the same functions. And in that way they are equivalent. However, not all languages are turing complete. See, for example, charity: https://github.com/dobesv/charity https://github.com/dobesv/charity Furthermore, turing completeness says nothing about expressiveness or capability. Imagine a language that has no IO. Such a language would be able to compute any function any other language can but not do anything viewable by the rest of the world. So obviously not equivalent. And w.r.t. expressiveness, there is some academic research into how to quantify that: https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/scp91-felleisen.pdf https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/scp91-felleisen.pdf
- duesabati 10mo ago
  I understand and agree, what I was trying to say is that one should not confine ones thinking by the constraints of a tool, would it be a programming language or whole framework, but to express everything as freely as possible without details of implementation only then one can go deeper and add concreteness that brings its set of constraints and all of this should be possible in any programming languages. I hope I've cleared my standpoint.
patrickmay 10mo ago

jmmcd 10mo ago

The best example of all is Prolog. It is always held up as the paradigmatic representative of logic programming, a rare language paradigm. But it doesn't need to be a language. It is really a collection of algorithms which should be a library in every language, together with a nice convention for expressing Prolog things in that language's syntax. (My comment is slightly off-topic to the article but on-topic to the title.)

bwestergard 10mo ago
Are there any particularly excellent examples of prolog implemented as a library you could point us to?
- chii 10mo ago
  not OP, but for clojure : https://github.com/bobschrag/clolog https://github.com/bobschrag/clolog
- khaled_ismaeel 10mo ago
  Not exactly prolog, but logic programming implemented as a library/DSL: https://minikanren.org/ https://minikanren.org/
  - jayd16 10mo ago
    If it's a DSL then it's "writing a new language" and you're just calling from a native API, no?
    - naasking 10mo ago
      Embedded DSLs are libraries. They are the epitome of the advice to write a library. It just so happens that the library abstractions could map to a language if you wanted to add parsing and all of the other machinery.
  - EricRiese 10mo ago
    Clojure's core.logic is based on minikanren, so that fits the bill.

vhantz 10mo ago

> Stanza provides an optional type system, garbage collection, and a multimethod based object system. But if you don't like Stanza's object system, there is no way to write your own. This is one of the main directions of programming language research. Can we design a language so expressive that library writers can easily write the most appropriate object system, or most appropriate type system, to fit their application? Perhaps one day we'll have such a language. We already have it. It's an obscure little language called C++. Tise interested in those kinds of extensions to a language should look into Herb Sutter's experiments with cppfront: https://hsutter.github.io/cppfront/welcome/overview/ https://hsutter.github.io/cppfront/welcome/overview/

lelanthran 10mo ago
C++ is most definitely not it. Lisp is what you are after if you want to include some object system as a library, or a new type of switch statement as a library or a new kind of if statement as a library. C++ can do none of that.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
  C++ can do some of that. Let's say I want an if statement that takes an integer and three blocks of code. It executes the first block if the integer is less than zero, the second if it is zero, and the third if it is positive. OK, if you squint enough that by "block of code" you mean closure, or function object, then I can write that in C++. I can make the if statement a free-standing function (that is, not a member of a class), and add it to any library I wish. Now, you can say that it's going to be tedious to use that, because you have to set up three closures every time you want to call this "super if". And you'd be right, but that's a different argument.
  - philipallstar 10mo ago
    How can you declare new syntax in C++? Wouldn't it just be a function call?
    - 10mo ago

css_apologist 10mo ago

> Are Java developers just not as competent as Ruby programmers? years ago a senior developer close to me said "when screening interviews, if i see rails i throw the resume in the trash" so ironic how trivial/stupid these language-based judgements are

unkulunkulu 10mo ago
I couple of years ago I would ask to collect your coworker’s garbage bin :) Not as easy to find in my vicinity, at least good ones, which is of course true for any language and profession in general. I have RoR on my resume and very fond of it.
wiseowise 10mo ago
> years ago a senior developer close to me said What was the senior's stack?
- oompydoompy74 10mo ago
  I’m going to assume Google Docs.
madmountaingoat 10mo ago
One side of my brain agrees that's a dumb way to judge anyone but then when I think about the accepted filtering mechanism they really aren't any better or any worse. You cannot interview everyone and ultimately you're looking for some combination of competence, alignment, drive and social fit. Filtering on where you worked previously or where you went to school or whether you can pass some coding challenge only partially fills in the matrix. And the size and shape of the organization can drive how much people in the hiring loop look at each data point. This senior engineer's ideal for alignment and social fit probably favored people who think like them or their department's head.
725686 10mo ago
If one is looking for Java developers, it only makes sense to throw rails resumes in the trash. It will save time for both parties.

patrickmay 10mo ago

> Can we design a language so expressive that library writers can easily write the most appropriate object system, or most appropriate type system, to fit their application? Why yes, it can and has been done: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/ECOOP.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/ECOOP.pdf

unkulunkulu 10mo ago

For me the title is a bit of a contradiction: I always think about the library as “the final language”. So author’s example of RoR/Ruby is “RoR is a great web service language that uses Ruby as the base, they evolved together and arguably as RoR is the main source of clients for ruby, ruby was as well designed for RoR as RoR for ruby” I think about programming/design as languages/translation in a lot of ways: its languages all the way down.

oaiey 10mo ago
I agree. c# and asp.net core also co-developed. Interestingly in both direction, towards users (tons of type inference, removing boilerplate, ...) and system (writing highly optimized web servers with low level paradigms)
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kayo_20211030 10mo ago

Any language/library needs to communicate in two directions: to the machine and to the people. At the micro-level, machines work with bits, or voltages, or whatever. That's a technological problem, not easy, but tractable in a mechanical sense. People, on the other hand, work with ideas, metaphors, expressions of intent, etc. If a language/library makes the communication of those things easier/better/faster; if it can be "written down" clearly, and "read" clearly by a person, then does it really matter into which taxonomic category it fits? We pick horses for courses. That seems about right. If Rails works for you, is complementary with what you want to achieve, is an accelerator, and is generally well-understood by the people with whom you work, then use it. Alternatively, if the answer to all the previous is Stanza then go with that. There's less "right" and "wrong" in those decisions than there is "advance", or "struggle". It sounds trite. But, use what works. If something doesn't work make something that does, iff that's the most efficient approach.

igt0 10mo ago

Logic systems are a good place where the library first approach tends to work well: you keep a small, boring core (the inference engine), and let people extend it with predicates, rules/operators, and domain packages. I’ve been experimenting with a small defeasible-logic core (argumentation semantics + priorities + conflict detection) that stays stable, while most of the real meaning lives in extension points. https://github.com/canto-lang/canto-lang https://github.com/canto-lang/canto-lang

morshu9001 10mo ago

"The more powerful the language, the easier the libraries are to use." for anyone thinking of reading the title without the body It's true, you couldn't really do Express in Java, at least not back then.

newsoftheday 10mo ago
I don't understand, what's Express? As for libraries and Java, I'd argue Java became a well established enterprise language and platform exactly because it makes such highly effective use of libraries.
- morshu9001 10mo ago
  It's the NodeJS webserver
oaiey 10mo ago
See C#'s asp.net core minimal apis (a express clone). So it is definitely possible but you need to co-develop the language. I think as you point out.
didip 10mo ago
It’s possible to have something like Express, take a look at Javalin. But Java problem is not the mechanics, it’s that the community doesn’t want nice things.
- morshu9001 10mo ago
  Kinda now that Java has lambdas, but still async in that disn't work as easily as JS, which is important. This is only recently starting to change with Project Loom.
- brabel 10mo ago
  Javalin was inspired by https://sparkjava.com/ https://sparkjava.com/ which was inspired by Sinatra (which I think also inspired Express?). Anyway, libraries like this were only really feasible after Java 8 because of the reliance on lambdas. Having to instantiate anonymous nested classes for every "function" was a total pain before that.

agumonkey 10mo ago

it's strange cause for some devs (lispers, smalltalkers, forth..ists), the language is the core, and any concept is to become a generic linguistic trait (and everything will be build by composing expressions with these traits). yet at the same time, clojurists love the idea of doing lots of dsl libraries..

rambambram 10mo ago

There is a good web framework for C. It's called PHP. ;)

oaiey 10mo ago
I think you stretch this library thought a bit too far :)

defactor 10mo ago

Java has Grails web framework. We have designed apps with 75% less resources and time compared to Spring at a big enterprise. But most devs wanted springboot.

newsoftheday 10mo ago
Grails requires Groovy, though you can integrate Java classes into a grails app. Now that we can develop script style with Java 21, I'd like to see something like Grails that worked with Java only...that would be a fun way to develop web apps. I liked Grails, just not Groovy.

sriku 10mo ago

This looks to me like partly a false dichotomy. We can design languages and write libraries. Some would even argue that some kinds of "libraries" could be viewed as languages themselves, as much as some languages might as well have been written as libraries in another language. Also often, the language doesn't live isolated from its implementation (compiler or interpreter). While theory looks at languages via its semantics, in practice as the OP notes it is about the quality of the implementation and what can be reasonably done with the language. A recent [1] case is Julia. I think it has hit a kind of sweet spot for language design where new performant code tends to get written in Julia rather than in some other language and bound to it. At its core, it is a simple "call functions, passing data in and getting results out" kind of language, but what the functions ("methods") mean and how the compiler does just-ahead-of-time compilation with deep type specialized code means you can write high level code that optimizes very well. Those mechanics operate under the hood though, which makes for a pleasant programming experience ... and there are loads of cutting edge packages being written in Julia. It is less interesting to look at Julia as "just the language". [1] recent in programming languages is perhaps anything <= 15 years? .. because it takes time to discover a language's potential.

jonny_eh 10mo ago
> This looks to me like partly a false dichotomy Wasn't that the point of the article? That you need both?
- Jtsummers 10mo ago
  Yes, but most of the commenters didn't read the article.
  - jonny_eh 10mo ago
    Yup, articles like this where the title is the opposite of the article's message is a trap to reveal that.

dieggsy 10mo ago

I think I mostly agree with the thesis here, but I actually liked the point in the title at face value, too. We need both, I think. I guess I'll be another annoying Lisp guy, but: > At this point, the right question to ask would be, well can you write a static-typing library for Scheme that then automatically checks your code for type errors? And the current answer, for now and for the foreseeable future, is no. No mainstream language today allows you to write a library to extend its type system. The author seems to provide a counter example themselves(?): > Racket and Shen provide mechanisms for extending their type systems... I wonder if this is as clear-cut as the author is making it out to be. Coalton, which is effectively a library (and language) for Common Lisp, seems like it basically does this. Maybe that's not exactly what the author is referring to, because it is essentially a new language on top of Lisp using its meta-programming facilities, as opposed to merely extending the type system. Still, it can be used as a library right alongside Lisp code, so I think it's in the same spirit of of the first question of writing a "static-typing library that automatically checks your code" in a dynamic language. Standard scheme may or may not be able to do this, but most Scheme implementations have unhygienic macros like CL's too, so I'd assume something similar would be possible. The fact that that these tend to be extensions from implementation designers might align with the article's point though. Also somewhat to the author's point, Coalton does rely strongly on CL's underlying type system, for which there's no real equivalent in Scheme. It also relies on implementation-specific optimizations alongside that. For what it's worth you can (and indeed people have) written object systems in Scheme, despite the language not having one, though they tend not to be performant, which is likely another point towards using/writing a different language. CL also tends to allow fairly deep extension of its object system through the Meta-object Protocol. I guess my point is that in my (probably biased) opinion, Lisps, or other languages with very strong meta-programming facilities, are pretty close to the language longed for in "Perhaps one day we'll have such a language." They aren't a silver bullet, of course. CL has no easy way to write performant coroutines/continuations, for example, even given all its extensibility. Scheme has no real type system, etc. etc. I don't think any of this invalidates the articles points, I'm just not sure I agree with the absolutes.

bluGill 10mo ago

Languages are "Easy" to design. There is nothing wrong designing a new language and it can be fun. There is however something wrong with releasing your new language! In most cases you should show it off to close friends, or your professor, and then burn it and all the source. Sure you might be better than the current language, but you won't be enough better as to be worth it. (even if the language is notoriously bad C++ where it is easy to be better - you won't be enough better as to be worth it). If you want a better language there are two good options: switch to a different one that already exists; or make your language better. There are lots of great choices for languages out there if you want to switch. If the language you are thinking of doesn't have an active community of people working on making it better, it probably isn't a good choice. Whichever language you choose though, libraries are the hard part. There are a lot of bad libraries, we need someone to write a better one - but only if one doesn't exist! For the great libraries out there, most need someone to contribute. A large part of libraries is the consistent interface. Often there is a great libFoo and libBar, but their APIs are not consistent and so we need a libBarWithFooStyleInterface, and/or libFooWithBarStyleInterface. Better yet, we need everyone to come together and agree on how the interface should be and then make both use that new standard - cleaning Augean stables with a toothbrush seems like an easier task. Of course in the real world there a hundreds of libraries each with a great interface that is not consistent with the others.

zabzonk 10mo ago
> then burn it and all the source Nah, don't do that. You will enjoy looking back at it in your old age. I wish I had all my old code now.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  fare enough. So long as you don't inflict it on the world as something they might really use it is fine.

newsoftheday 10mo ago

The article seems to vibe railing against Java.

ActorNightly 10mo ago
Nothing wrong with that. Log4shell should have been the end of everyone using Java.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  There is this little mobile phone platform out there.
  - ActorNightly 10mo ago
    It has moved to Kotlin, which is what Java should be. With a custom VM. And even now, Google is moving to Fuschia which is Dart based.
    - pjmlp 10mo ago
      Nope, it is still Java, Kotlin is only the JetPack libraries. https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture Also Koltin is meaningless without Java Virtual Machine, which is used to power most of Koltin existence[0], Gradle, Android Studio, thus the Android team keeps updating the Java support so that they don't lose access to the most used versions in Maven Central. [0] - Kotlin Native and Kotlin Javascript are quite poor in available libraries

Arch-TK 10mo ago

The problem is really that sometimes making something feel ergonomic in a language can be a pain. Although that in itself might be a hint to change language and write your library there, instead of inventing a new one.

taylorallred 10mo ago

I agree with the sentiment of this article but the question that fascinates me is "when do you need a language feature instead of a library in order to accomplish X, Y, or Z?"

oaiey 10mo ago
Well there are really bad languages. Like ABAP or SQL. But even in higher languages like Java, you sometimes loose expressiveness

6510 10mo ago

Libraries and languages are not actually about syntax or function. They are communities first. They each have a community of users and one of developers. Depending on their application they each attract very different people - which is wonderful. The work matters too of course. Frequently used functions should be categorically bagged into libs and if the lib is used often enough some of it's functionality should be baked into the language. If languages require something often enough the language layer above should provide it and if things are frequently needed close to the metal it should be baked in hardware. Possibly as a co-processor and then as part of the cpu. We should even have a similar process moving things in the other direction. I cant wait for the day when floating-point arithmetic becomes a library complete with a community of people who still think it's wonderful. Like a football channel to cleanly contain that kind of undesirable materials. Some libraries/modules/frameworks should also be replaced by competent developers. We don't want a leftpad community.

NoGravitas 10mo ago

Of course, in Lisp, you can implement language features as libraries, which kind of undercuts the point of this article.

kazinator 10mo ago

> In summary, the purpose of a general-purpose programming language is to enable the creation of powerful and easy-to-use libraries. Close! The purpose of a general-purpose programming language is to enable the creation of powerful and easy-to-use languages, but often just libraries.

vivzkestrel 10mo ago

- i need a language that looks like typed python - and runs 50 times faster than c, c++, rust and zig - comes with a standard library covering 50000 use cases - has direct integrations with drivers to every major database, crm, analytics provider, key value store, queue systems

CyberDildonics 10mo ago

Lots of languages could just be implemented with classes in C++. Every "probabilistic language" could just be types that interact with each other properly.

bmc7505 10mo ago

There are a few approaches if you want to write a new language. One, as the author argues, is to write a library in an existing language, which may require sacrificing ergonomics to fit inside the syntax of the host language, but is safe, modular and reusable. Many DSLs can be bolted onto an existing language with support for compiler extensions. This approach offers more flexibility, but often leads to fragmentation and poor interoperability in the language ecosystem. There is third approach, established by a group in Minnesota [1], which is to design languages and tools which are modular and extensible from the get-go, so that extensions are more interoperable. They do research on how to make this work using attribute grammars. If the host language has a sufficiently expressive type system, you can often get away with writing a fluent API [2] or type safe embedded DSL. But designing languages and type systems with good support for meta-programming is also an active area of research. [3, 4] If none of these options work, the last resort is to start from tabula rasa and write your own parser, compiler, and developer tools. This offers the most flexibility, but requires an enormous amount of engineering, and generally is not recommended in 2026. [1]: https://melt.cs.umn.edu https://melt.cs.umn.edu [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.01473 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.01473 [3]: https://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kam/papers/aplas2016.pdf https://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kam/papers/aplas2016.pdf [4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.17065 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.17065

GZGavinZhao 10mo ago
> There is third approach, established by a group in Minnesota [1], which is to design languages and tools which are modular and extensible from the get-go, so that extensions are more interoperable. They do research on how to make this work using attribute grammars. MLIR [1] has entered the chat :P I know I know MLIR is an IR and not a programming language, but MLIR does give me the feeling of "an IR to rule them all" (as long as you're ok with SSA representation), and the IR itself is quite high-level to the point it almost feels like an actual programming language, e.g. you can write a MLIR program that compiles to C using the EmitC dialect that feels a lot like writing C. [1]: https://mlir.llvm.org https://mlir.llvm.org
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  Well some languages, like Mojo, expose MLIR directly in the language as intrisics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21039 https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21039

tjchear 10mo ago

The author makes a good point about language capabilities enabling certain libraries to be written, just as DSL makes it easier to reason about problems and implement solutions with the right kind of abstractions and language ergonomics (usually at the expense of expressivity and flexibility). There’s a time in my life where I designed languages and wrote compilers. One type of language I’ve always thought about that could be made more approachable to non technical users is an outline-liked language with English like syntaxes and being a DSL, the shape of the outline would be very much fixed and on a guardrail, and can’t express arbitrary instructions like normal programming languages, but an escape hatch (to more expressive language) for advanced users can be provided. An area where this DSL can be used would be common portal admin app generation and workflow automation. That said, with the advent of AI assistants, I’m not sure if there is still room for my DSL idea.

whattheheckheck 10mo ago
I mean that's Zapier or n8n?

hulitu 10mo ago

> “Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016) It looks that somebody listened. We now have 3 GTK libraries in a system, a lot of graphics libraries (cairo, etc) 3d libraries (Mesa, vulkan). It is a mess.

noreplydev 10mo ago

i think that languages is are for worlds and libraries are for adding ships, planes and cars to that worlds, enabling those worlds itself. the key is that not all worlds enable the same kinds of libraries.

OkayPhysicist 10mo ago

I have to disagree about the author's described purpose of programming languages. PLs exist to provide elegant expression to a curated subset of ways of expressing solutions to problems. At the extremes, we call these paradigms. Functional languages, Object Oriented languages, Array languages, etc. But every language exists to make some subset of "shapes" of solutions easier to read and write. Elixir encourages you to describe your programs as a distributed system of programs each running a series of transformations to data, thanks to its pipeline system, and to push your branching to function-call level with its pattern-matching multiple dispatch. Java encourages you to write your application as a collection of things, that know stuff and do stuff, including telling other things to do stuff based on things they know. C and Go encourage you to write your programs as an ordered series of atomic tasks for the computer to complete. SQL has you describe what you want your output to look like. Etc, etc. There are inherent trade offs between languages, because what you make inelegant to express or even inexpressible carries value, too.

scoofy 10mo ago

As a student of philosophy of language, I obviously agree with the author (against the quoted thesis). The structure of a language matters to the ease and feel of its use, despite even being logically identical. One parallel would be the syntactic benefits of something like Hintikka’s independence-friendly logic vs first order logic, even if they are equivalent. The sentiment shared is that we should sacrifice benefits to the next generation to make our own lives easier. This is a common sentiment, but a sad one. The goal should be a natural language based programming language, that everyone can use, along side a technical programming language that makes unambiguous the interface between the language and the machine. Everyone seems to endorse their happy medium, and those languages are also perfectly fine.

butterisgood 10mo ago

I think this thinking makes sense if you've not used enough programming languages pragmatically. But, if you squint, great API design is a bit like embedded domain specific language design as well. I think there's room for both.

ninalanyon 10mo ago

I'd say that the best thing ever would be an easy way to call a library written in xxx from a program written in yyyy. There are lots of libraries already. Instead of rewriting them in every language why make them available to every language. Yes, I know it would be difficult and in some cases impossible.

fithisux 10mo ago

Julia got it right with its macro system. You can write embedded DSLs easily.

wolvesechoes 10mo ago
But they are still worse experience that dedicated, separate languages. Compare ModelingToolkit.jl with Modelica (ok, there are some differences in capacilities, but just compare how better is to express models in Modelica).
- fithisux 10mo ago
  DSL is always better until you need to grow an ecosystem around it. If you can, go down the DSL path, otherwise use embedded DSL. If you can, go down the embedded DSL path otherwise use a library.