4 ms·

I wish developers had more sense of marketing in general - with all due respect to it's author(s) but BODOL (the word) sounds,... well strange, unsexy, unintere

by tzaman 13y ago

I wish developers had more sense of marketing in general - with all due respect to it's author(s) but BODOL (the word) sounds,... well strange, unsexy, uninteresting. It really doesn't do the language itself any justice!

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
biot 13y ago
To me, it sounds like a lisp-variant of COBOL: (IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. (PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.) (PROCEDURE DIVISION. ((DISPLAY 'Hello, world'.) (STOP RUN.))))
- derleth 13y ago
  COBOL does have one thing worth stealing, though, which is its data definition language and automatic parser generation facility in the core language. Essentially, COBOL allows programmers to declare what their input file looks like and the compiler generates code that does all of the work of parsing the input and getting the data into the relevant variables. Because COBOL comes from the (Big) Iron Age, this is all in terms of record-oriented files with fixed-width fields; a modern re-implementation of the concept would have to operate in terms of nested data structures (XML, JSON, sexps, etc.), which a Lisp-like's syntax is well-equipped to describe anyway.
whatshisface 13y ago
If you made a list of everyone who picks a language by it's name, you wold not find anyone on that list who would like this language.
sparx 13y ago
it has something to do with author's name.
- konstruktor 13y ago
  My intuition says that it's a pun using her name and, well, COBOL, which I found quite awesome in the context of trying to build a beautiful funcional language.
bitcracker 13y ago
Features are much more relevant than marketing. Look at Ruby, some years ago it was hyped a lot but that enthusiasm has fade away. Look at Lisp, it wasn't hyped for about 50 years but it is still alive today, and many modern language developments still copy features from Lisp. If the features are good then I don't care about the name. I really like Rust (http://www.rust-lang.org/ http://www.rust-lang.org/) although it sounds "rusty".
- pavelludiq 13y ago
  Obviously you haven't seen the lisp ads from the 80's :) Lisp was surely hyped then. Not to mention all the hype from people like ESR and PG. Even clojure owes part of it's success to the great presentation skills of Rick Hickey and the other early clojure adopters. Languages DO succeed mostly because of marketing, if it was features, then smalltalk would have won, and C++ and Java never would have existed, Lisp would have won and python, ruby and perl would have been forgotten. Even other technologies works that way too, NeXT and the other Unixes would have won, and windows would have never had a chance if what you are saying is true. As for the name, if clojure was named anything that had the word "lisp" in it, like "foo lisp" or the like, it would have been dead already. Even racket had to get rid of the word "scheme" from their name for marketing reasons.
  - bitcracker 13y ago
    > Obviously you haven't seen the lisp ads from the 80's :) I studied computer science in the 80's. Maybe that there were some business ads of Lisp (especially Lisp machines). But I had the strong impression that Ada was much more hyped than Lisp. Where is Ada today? > if it was features, then smalltalk would have won It depends on how "features" is defined. C won over Lisp and Smalltalk because of the single feature of performance. At the time when C was invented hardware was very expensive. > Even racket had to get rid of the word "scheme" from their name for marketing reasons. Racket is a different language. Scheme (R6RS etc.) is a subset of that. According to your logic Rust will have no chance at all. We will see.
    - hga 13y ago

by tzaman 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

biot 13y ago

To me, it sounds like a lisp-variant of COBOL: (IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. (PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.) (PROCEDURE DIVISION. ((DISPLAY 'Hello, world'.) (STOP RUN.))))

derleth 13y ago
COBOL does have one thing worth stealing, though, which is its data definition language and automatic parser generation facility in the core language. Essentially, COBOL allows programmers to declare what their input file looks like and the compiler generates code that does all of the work of parsing the input and getting the data into the relevant variables. Because COBOL comes from the (Big) Iron Age, this is all in terms of record-oriented files with fixed-width fields; a modern re-implementation of the concept would have to operate in terms of nested data structures (XML, JSON, sexps, etc.), which a Lisp-like's syntax is well-equipped to describe anyway.

whatshisface 13y ago

If you made a list of everyone who picks a language by it's name, you wold not find anyone on that list who would like this language.

sparx 13y ago

it has something to do with author's name.

konstruktor 13y ago
My intuition says that it's a pun using her name and, well, COBOL, which I found quite awesome in the context of trying to build a beautiful funcional language.

bitcracker 13y ago

Features are much more relevant than marketing. Look at Ruby, some years ago it was hyped a lot but that enthusiasm has fade away. Look at Lisp, it wasn't hyped for about 50 years but it is still alive today, and many modern language developments still copy features from Lisp. If the features are good then I don't care about the name. I really like Rust (http://www.rust-lang.org/ http://www.rust-lang.org/) although it sounds "rusty".

pavelludiq 13y ago
Obviously you haven't seen the lisp ads from the 80's :) Lisp was surely hyped then. Not to mention all the hype from people like ESR and PG. Even clojure owes part of it's success to the great presentation skills of Rick Hickey and the other early clojure adopters. Languages DO succeed mostly because of marketing, if it was features, then smalltalk would have won, and C++ and Java never would have existed, Lisp would have won and python, ruby and perl would have been forgotten. Even other technologies works that way too, NeXT and the other Unixes would have won, and windows would have never had a chance if what you are saying is true. As for the name, if clojure was named anything that had the word "lisp" in it, like "foo lisp" or the like, it would have been dead already. Even racket had to get rid of the word "scheme" from their name for marketing reasons.
- bitcracker 13y ago
  > Obviously you haven't seen the lisp ads from the 80's :) I studied computer science in the 80's. Maybe that there were some business ads of Lisp (especially Lisp machines). But I had the strong impression that Ada was much more hyped than Lisp. Where is Ada today? > if it was features, then smalltalk would have won It depends on how "features" is defined. C won over Lisp and Smalltalk because of the single feature of performance. At the time when C was invented hardware was very expensive. > Even racket had to get rid of the word "scheme" from their name for marketing reasons. Racket is a different language. Scheme (R6RS etc.) is a subset of that. According to your logic Rust will have no chance at all. We will see.
  - hga 13y ago