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Part of the reason for the recent explosion of new languages is the emergence of technologies that make implementing new languages much easier, LLVM being one o

Part of the reason for the recent explosion of new languages is the emergence of technologies that make implementing new languages much easier, LLVM being one of the most obvious ones. Swift, Rust, Julia, and various new implementations of older languages all use LLVM. Implementing new languages on managed runtimes like the JVM and CLR is also much easier than building a full toolchain from scratch. It's also easier than ever to build a productive community around an open source language – git and GitHub are amazingly effective collaboration tools. The premise that old languages are pinnacles of perfection is simply not true. C, Lisp, Haskell, Smalltalk, etc. – these languages did not get everything right. What they did do is get enough things right that it is really hard to make a language that is better by enough of a margin that it is worth breaking away entirely and starting from scratch. To make it worth switching to a new langauge, that language has to really make your life much, much better. Performance, convenience, safety, expressiveness – whatever a new language gives you more of, it has to give you so much more to be worth the trouble of switching to a less mature language with a smaller, less developed community. But that's what people are trying to do with these new languages. Consider Lisp as a potential pinnacle of perfection. Paul Graham quipped that Lisp was "discovered" by John McCarthy, rather than invented or designed – Lisp already existed in the way that mathematical truths exist. That's a cute idea, but clearly not literally true. There were still a lot of design choices – parentheses for example. Why not square or curly brackets? Why not indentation? There were also choices that are now almost universally recognized as mistakes. Dynamic scoping, for example, which was later replaced by lexical scoping in Scheme. People who haven't tried their hand at language design generally tend not to fully appreciate how many unfortunate tradeoffs are inherent in the process. Static vs. dynamic? Both have great benefits as well as major drawbacks. That's just the first major choice – and each choice affects most of the rest of the language. A coherent language design ends up being a crystalized fractal of difficult, uncertain choices. You never know when the difficulties you're facing in one area might have been easier in some nearby fold of this vast, combinatorial design space – most of which is completely unexplored. The problem is compounded by the fact that although it may seem mathematical, language design is really a subfield of applied psychology: ideas often seem great on paper, but when you try them out, people find them incredibly awkward, unintutive, or just plain annoying.

waps 12y ago
> Consider Lisp as a potential pinnacle of perfection. Paul Graham quipped that Lisp was "discovered" by John McCarthy, rather than invented or designed – Lisp already existed in the way that mathematical truths exist. That's a cute idea, but clearly not literally true. There were still a lot of design choices – parentheses for example. Why not square or curly brackets? Why not indentation? There were also choices that are now almost universally recognized as mistakes. Dynamic scoping, for example, which was later replaced by lexical scoping in Scheme. Well, have you seen lambda calculus, which predates lisp ? That's basically lisp (it has lambda, it has bound and unbound variables, it has let, it has steps, it has recursion, ...). All John McCarthy did was implement it. That's where the parentheses come from, of course. Why not curly brackets or indentation ? Because in maths, parantheses specify sequence of calculation, curly brackets denote collections, and indentation doesn't mean anything. Since the concept being expressed is the sequence, they used parentheses. In fact the first reference I can find to parentheses dates from the ancient Greeks (and they were probably merely the first one to write it down). Lambda calculus is a generalization of mathematical formulas by Alonzo Church to describe computation (as opposed to "just" values or functions, what normal mathematical formulae do. Functions in math are very, very different from functions in lambda calculus. This cannot be said to be very original either, as is was mostly a way to introduce some sanity into Hilbert's "Entscheidungsproblem" ("can you give a mathematical formula that solves mathematical formulae"), and more generally, into constructivism. This was made possible by finding a consistent way to express the combination operators in logic. Constructivism was a branch of logic that ... You can keep going back for quite a while, but the point is that the form of lisp was effectively decided by someone who's name we don't even know, who lived in one of the ancient Greek city states. He (or she ? not impossible in that period) also had absolutely no idea what they were doing either.
- StefanKarpinski 12y ago
  There's a lot more to an actual Lisp than lambda calculus. No Lisp ships with just lambda – that would be absurd and unusable. So there are design choices: choices of standard functions like "car", "cdr", "set" – and what kind of scoping "set" implements. The Common Lisp and Scheme specs are literally lists of design choices.

waps 12y ago

> Consider Lisp as a potential pinnacle of perfection. Paul Graham quipped that Lisp was "discovered" by John McCarthy, rather than invented or designed – Lisp already existed in the way that mathematical truths exist. That's a cute idea, but clearly not literally true. There were still a lot of design choices – parentheses for example. Why not square or curly brackets? Why not indentation? There were also choices that are now almost universally recognized as mistakes. Dynamic scoping, for example, which was later replaced by lexical scoping in Scheme. Well, have you seen lambda calculus, which predates lisp ? That's basically lisp (it has lambda, it has bound and unbound variables, it has let, it has steps, it has recursion, ...). All John McCarthy did was implement it. That's where the parentheses come from, of course. Why not curly brackets or indentation ? Because in maths, parantheses specify sequence of calculation, curly brackets denote collections, and indentation doesn't mean anything. Since the concept being expressed is the sequence, they used parentheses. In fact the first reference I can find to parentheses dates from the ancient Greeks (and they were probably merely the first one to write it down). Lambda calculus is a generalization of mathematical formulas by Alonzo Church to describe computation (as opposed to "just" values or functions, what normal mathematical formulae do. Functions in math are very, very different from functions in lambda calculus. This cannot be said to be very original either, as is was mostly a way to introduce some sanity into Hilbert's "Entscheidungsproblem" ("can you give a mathematical formula that solves mathematical formulae"), and more generally, into constructivism. This was made possible by finding a consistent way to express the combination operators in logic. Constructivism was a branch of logic that ... You can keep going back for quite a while, but the point is that the form of lisp was effectively decided by someone who's name we don't even know, who lived in one of the ancient Greek city states. He (or she ? not impossible in that period) also had absolutely no idea what they were doing either.

StefanKarpinski 12y ago
There's a lot more to an actual Lisp than lambda calculus. No Lisp ships with just lambda – that would be absurd and unusable. So there are design choices: choices of standard functions like "car", "cdr", "set" – and what kind of scoping "set" implements. The Common Lisp and Scheme specs are literally lists of design choices.