3 ms·

I [...] expect Python to die well before the end of my professional career [...] Why? I do invest my time in longer term languages such as Scheme and Haskell.

I [...] expect Python to die well before the end of my professional career [...] Why? I do invest my time in longer term languages such as Scheme and Haskell. What makes Scheme and Haskell "long-term" languages?

ramchip 17y ago
I don't really expect Scheme to make a huge comeback (especially when there's Clojure to play around), nor do I think Python will die very quickly, so I don't fully agree with the poster. However, a lot of new ideas are tried in Haskell, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gained importance as people make it more accessible. It's a very powerful and concise language.
anc2020 17y ago
> Why? Obviously I can't know it for sure, but my argument hinges on parallelism. Imperative programming isn't so well suited to parallelism as you probably know, and Python is sticking firmly to the imperative pseudo-code area of programming (which it does very well). Even for the scripting tasks I think in 10 years time it'll just be unacceptable to have so many cores under-utilised and functional languages make parallelism so much easier that it'll be a fairly easy choice to start coding a new project in those languages instead of Python. And then on top of this main argument, I'll just say you never know - I don't think people would have predicted the decline Perl has had to such a big degree (sure its not dead but its going that way). Python won't be here in 100 years (or 200, or 300..), I'm 100% sure. So I'm just arguing that the actual number of years left of Python is likely to be within 30 years. No-one knows the exact length, but my prediction is that its within that range. > What makes Scheme and Haskell "long-term" languages? They're just very simple and pure, and that's important for longevity because they aren't likely to be replaced in a kind of "major revision change" by a similar but better language, because they don't really need a big revision change, they're very good (or should I say "good enough") already. Python just doesn't so obviously provide the best language of its kind (dynamic, OOP, imperative) and is prone to be replaced by a different kind of language or a slightly different language of the same kind. Both my answers are long enough that no doubt there'll be holes to pick in them. Eg. Should I have said "Scheme"? Well I don't think Scheme will ever make it big, but I do still think it'll be around in the long term to much the same degree it is now. * By long term I meant at least 100 years for both Scheme and Haskell. *Edit: That was a bit big, I'd like to correct it to "at least 30 years, and quite likely 100 years"
owinebarger 17y ago
If nothing else, implementing a reasonably efficient but basic Scheme interpreter is a short exercise that can be done in a pinch. "Reasonably efficient" is a consequence of the proper tail recursion.

ramchip 17y ago

I don't really expect Scheme to make a huge comeback (especially when there's Clojure to play around), nor do I think Python will die very quickly, so I don't fully agree with the poster. However, a lot of new ideas are tried in Haskell, and I wouldn't be surprised if it gained importance as people make it more accessible. It's a very powerful and concise language.

anc2020 17y ago

> Why? Obviously I can't know it for sure, but my argument hinges on parallelism. Imperative programming isn't so well suited to parallelism as you probably know, and Python is sticking firmly to the imperative pseudo-code area of programming (which it does very well). Even for the scripting tasks I think in 10 years time it'll just be unacceptable to have so many cores under-utilised and functional languages make parallelism so much easier that it'll be a fairly easy choice to start coding a new project in those languages instead of Python. And then on top of this main argument, I'll just say you never know - I don't think people would have predicted the decline Perl has had to such a big degree (sure its not dead but its going that way). Python won't be here in 100 years (or 200, or 300..), I'm 100% sure. So I'm just arguing that the actual number of years left of Python is likely to be within 30 years. No-one knows the exact length, but my prediction is that its within that range. > What makes Scheme and Haskell "long-term" languages? They're just very simple and pure, and that's important for longevity because they aren't likely to be replaced in a kind of "major revision change" by a similar but better language, because they don't really need a big revision change, they're very good (or should I say "good enough") already. Python just doesn't so obviously provide the best language of its kind (dynamic, OOP, imperative) and is prone to be replaced by a different kind of language or a slightly different language of the same kind. Both my answers are long enough that no doubt there'll be holes to pick in them. Eg. Should I have said "Scheme"? Well I don't think Scheme will ever make it big, but I do still think it'll be around in the long term to much the same degree it is now. * By long term I meant at least 100 years for both Scheme and Haskell. *Edit: That was a bit big, I'd like to correct it to "at least 30 years, and quite likely 100 years"

owinebarger 17y ago

If nothing else, implementing a reasonably efficient but basic Scheme interpreter is a short exercise that can be done in a pinch. "Reasonably efficient" is a consequence of the proper tail recursion.