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The recent profileration of languages amazes me. Every major computing house now has one or more programming languages. Is this a strategic approach to reign th

The recent profileration of languages amazes me. Every major computing house now has one or more programming languages. Is this a strategic approach to reign the future.? Or has it become easier to design languages. Thinking of how little Java helped Sun to escape disappearing I m curious of the opinions of people in charge.. Ps: welcome again Ceylon, hope you'll give RedHat a brighter future in the enterprise.

vidarh 12y ago
It's not that recent. I used to spend hours pouring over shareware/ pd collection catalogues back in the 80's, mostly looking for interesting new languages. From late 80's to mid 90's (I think) there was even a magazine called Computer Language that focused almost exclusively on writing about different programming languages. It was common to see articles about writing compilers and interpreters for your own languages in various magazines. One Amiga magazine I picked up in 1990 in Germany included a listing for a full (tiny) compiler for a Pascal inspired language.
stox 12y ago
We've been here before. This seems to occur in cycles. It will soon burn out, and then we will see a plethora of operating systems. A period of relative stability will occur, and the cycle will begin again.
vorg 12y ago
What is a language? How deeply up and down the abstraction scale does a "language" need to implement to be called a language? Some languages, like Go, implement a different edition directly atop many various OS's, with their own garbage collection and type inference. Whereas others, like Coffeescript, are text generators sitting atop and relying on features of other languages. And there's many shades in between, such as languages that produce JVM bytecode rather than executables for each different hardware target the JVM sits atop. Then there's the issue of how much support atop the text files a language directly supports. Some, like Kotlin, make IDE support an official policy, whereas others, like Java, don't, instead relying on third parties to provide it. Some languages only provide the visual interface. Macros, like in Clojure, and compiler directives, like in C, could also be considered "atop the text file syntax". If readable source code in some certain language can be generated from a VM or an AST that many different "languages" target, then in a sense they're not really languages at all, only "bytecode generators" or "transpilers".
- Chiba-City 12y ago
  This is a very good question. Unix/C came from the glorious "system building" era. They took responsibility for building and documenting "the whole stack" - from assembly to signals to troff. Wirth's Oberon OS/language were codesigned in the same fashion. Smalltalk/V took over a PC. Ceylon seems like a very nicely designed language (and I don't mean syntax). I would love to see a LLVM back end and the requisite docs for low level system hacking.

vidarh 12y ago

It's not that recent. I used to spend hours pouring over shareware/ pd collection catalogues back in the 80's, mostly looking for interesting new languages. From late 80's to mid 90's (I think) there was even a magazine called Computer Language that focused almost exclusively on writing about different programming languages. It was common to see articles about writing compilers and interpreters for your own languages in various magazines. One Amiga magazine I picked up in 1990 in Germany included a listing for a full (tiny) compiler for a Pascal inspired language.

stox 12y ago

We've been here before. This seems to occur in cycles. It will soon burn out, and then we will see a plethora of operating systems. A period of relative stability will occur, and the cycle will begin again.

vorg 12y ago

What is a language? How deeply up and down the abstraction scale does a "language" need to implement to be called a language? Some languages, like Go, implement a different edition directly atop many various OS's, with their own garbage collection and type inference. Whereas others, like Coffeescript, are text generators sitting atop and relying on features of other languages. And there's many shades in between, such as languages that produce JVM bytecode rather than executables for each different hardware target the JVM sits atop. Then there's the issue of how much support atop the text files a language directly supports. Some, like Kotlin, make IDE support an official policy, whereas others, like Java, don't, instead relying on third parties to provide it. Some languages only provide the visual interface. Macros, like in Clojure, and compiler directives, like in C, could also be considered "atop the text file syntax". If readable source code in some certain language can be generated from a VM or an AST that many different "languages" target, then in a sense they're not really languages at all, only "bytecode generators" or "transpilers".

Chiba-City 12y ago
This is a very good question. Unix/C came from the glorious "system building" era. They took responsibility for building and documenting "the whole stack" - from assembly to signals to troff. Wirth's Oberon OS/language were codesigned in the same fashion. Smalltalk/V took over a PC. Ceylon seems like a very nicely designed language (and I don't mean syntax). I would love to see a LLVM back end and the requisite docs for low level system hacking.