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The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

63 points by rohunati 12y ago

Artemis2 12y ago
Sorry Wired, but you don't build up hype for a language like that.
donpdonp 12y ago
spoiler: the language is D. http://dlang.org/ http://dlang.org/
signa11 12y ago
not sure if D is a stranger in these parts.
gerbal 12y ago
But can it compile to Javascript?
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  It's got an LLVM backend so yes. Probably not production ready.
- astrodust 12y ago
  What can't?
  - jarrett 12y ago
    True--in principle any language can be executed in the JS runtime. A lot of them can even be executed reasonably quickly. Though I suppose the parent comment was asking whether a mature compiler from D to JS currently exists.
- Zelphyr 12y ago
  More importantly, does it contain an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp? If not then I really don't see it having a future.
- _random_ 12y ago
  Yes, any good language can be obfuscated by converting to JS.
- andralex 12y ago
  Wierdest thing it's it can: http://goo.gl/88eFzs http://goo.gl/88eFzs
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tdees40 12y ago
D? It's been around for a fairly long time, and it doesn't really have much momentum. I'm not sure why it's "the next big programming language".
- srean 12y ago
  Right! momentum is the most technically relevant quality of merit. Lets have a wholesome and fulfilling discussion of that aspect in particular. If that fails, lets discuss semicolons, and braces and make this HN story very meaningful and informative. After all that is the kind of discussion I come here for. If an article is crappy lets make the discussion around it crappier still. Shudder at the thought that a discussion could be stimulating even if based on an article less than stellar. Low and middle brow, here we come. Ha! you are fun, searching through my comment history and downvoting old comments still downvotable. Whatever floats your boat.
  - JacksonGariety 12y ago
    But the title doesn't say "of merit" it just says "big."
  - danmaz74 12y ago
    Unfortunately, technical merit doesn't make anything "the next big thing". High momentum for a prolonged period of time does.
  - nitid_name 12y ago
    I imagine a language needs a certain rate of adoption to maintain the amount of programmers actively coding in that language. I feel like the term "momentum" accurately encompasses this idea. >Lets talk about Justin Bieber! I don't understand why you invoked the name of a Canadian popstar. There is no chance of such a comment adding to the discussion.
    - freyrs3 12y ago
      There is a strong argument to be made that software profession does have some resemblance to pop music culture. "[Pop culture] it has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present." Alan Kay 'made this rather salient observation a while back and the more I think about it the more truth I find in it.
noir_lord 12y ago
Has anyone at wired these days actually seen a computer? If they have they should really show it to their journalists.
- drcode 12y ago
  Certainly! Here is video proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZkJd4u0Us&feature=kp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZkJd4u0Us&feature=kp
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    That is perfect!
jbrooksuk 12y ago
Is this because Facebook uses it? D has been round for longer than they seem to be making out.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
Andrei is looking pretty fit these days. Being a research scientist at Facebook is good for your health it looks like.
x43b 12y ago
Previous discussion with 14 comments from 6 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7998144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7998144
rossjudson 12y ago
The phrase "C++ is an extremely fast language -- meaning software built with it runs at high speed" needs to be changed to "It's possible to build high speed software with C++". I take any performance claims made by a particular language with a pretty big grain of salt (particularly those made vs Java/JVM) unless they're accompanied by some reasonably sophisticated benchmarks and source that actually show a performance difference -- not just one that low-level language enthusiasts presume exists.
- philosophus 12y ago
  Well, I think you could be a bit more specific than that and reasonably say something like "If speed is a high priority for you, then C++ is often a good choice." That's why PC games are generally written in C++.
- YZF 12y ago
  Here's one: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H... And yes, languages are not slow or fast. The JVM could be as fast or even faster than native (AOT) because JIT can in theory optimize better than AOT. There are fixes planned for performance issues. Things have improved since the benchmark. It's only one particular benchmark. One specific implementation of VM/compilers/etc. Let me show you some badly written code in language X that runs slower than language Y on machine Z. In my opinion JIT is always going to be slower than native (AOT). Maybe the gap will close but fundamentally you can do anything a JIT does AOT at zero run-time cost but not the other way around. That's not a language thing, C++ targetted at a JIT environment (and I think you can target .NET for example) will also run slower and languages that are JITted today could possibly be AOT. The other thing is that if a specific language doesn't allow fine control over memory layouts and data types at the native level and/or if there are inherent costs in the language's design (e.g. duck typing) that is also something that will ultimately prevent it from running as fast as languages that do. That's because you can always build higher abstractions from primitive ones but you can rarely build a primitive one from a higher one. Very smart compilers may be able to identify a "primitive use case" and optimize for that but in general that's a much harder problem.
addflip 12y ago
Whenever I see the story is from Wired I always check the comments to see if it's worth my time more often than not it isn't.
nawitus 12y ago
I think most programmers I know have heard of D. When I took at look at it years ago, I concluded that the main problem was that it tried to please everyone. There's simply 'too many' features without a core theme to drive programming.
- srean 12y ago
  In a fun and meta sort of way you are saying D has not tried to please you. There are structural problems with this kind of criticism btw I have upvoted your comment, I do share the vision of a small elegant language yet sufficiently powerful language. At the same time I if some parts of D were to be thrown out I would find a way to complain about it. In fact one of my gripes is that it does not have compile time sum types and pattern matching, that and lightweight and efficient fibres (I believe these abstractions still use OS's threading mechanism underneath, I would be very pleased to be proven wrong). The thing is D initially wanted to be C++ done right and then C++ done better. So with that in mind it has to have a lot of features. I do appreciate a lot that D feels a lot more homogeneous and designed rather than built up with unrelenting accretion the like C++. An aspect that I quite like is that if it is not immediately clear what should be the right way to resolve a design problem (for example name clash between function overloading and specialization) the D tendency is to make it into an error till the right solution/semantics emerges. In C++ sometimes the choice is somewhat arbitrary: here we have k choices lets pick one and go with it even if it has nothing obviously convincing going for it. I would like to draw your eye towards templates and template metaprogramming. It really feels bolted on C++, and its really tortuous to use. In D however, although it was added much later it gels very nicely with the rest of the languages. Template metaprogramming is nothing special in D. Its just a function like any other except that it and its arguments are evaluated at compile time. (for D developers reading this, please can we have reference counting for CTFE). So yes you are correct, it has a lot of features, given D's design scope that is hard to avoid, but these features do fit well enough with each other for a practical language to be used in anger, and fit a lot better than its immediate rival C++ / Java.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    You're right in that people often comment that D has too many features, and btw please add X, Y and Z features!
bithush 12y ago
They got it wrong, the next big language is obviously Limbo![0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_programming_language
acomjean 12y ago
The problem with low level languages is they don't live in isolation. As someone who worked on a large project in Ada, you'll need to at some point use the OS and its libraries which for Unix is in C. Want to network or get a OS semaphore? C. Many languages support this call to the C library functionality, but it always seems to force a lot of things back into the C way of doing things. Maybe with a runtime (Java!, or ada tasks) this is abstracted away, but its still there..
- jobu 12y ago
  Alexandrescu talked about D at Boostcon a few years back, and as I recall he was planning to make it compatible with C system libraries.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    D has been compatible with C libraries since the beginning.
- CountHackulus 12y ago
  Many of the libraries you'd want to use are already ported or binary compatible (just need a header file) with D. Given that a fibre-based web framework has been written with it, and that it can use pointers natively, there's not a whole lot you can't do with it. Even writing bare metal code should in theory be doable with some work.
russelluresti 12y ago
I read the title of this article and thought "HN is now a parody of HN."
pnathan 12y ago
Last time I looked at D (maybe 6-8 years ago), I saw a C++ reskinned, and two standard libraries, incompatible. Looking at it today, it looks much more modern, but I'm simply not interested. I've drunk the Rust koolaid. :-) (But it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast with a decently sized project for both D and Rust).
drudru11 12y ago
cade metz alert
exacube 12y ago
Man, Facebook has a lot of hookups with Wired. You always see articles on Wired about Facebook projects and tech. relevant: Co-creator of D works at Facebook.
wkdown 12y ago
Let me put on my tinfoil hat for a second. Two companies that love user data are making "languages" for us to write our applications with (Facebook with Hack and React, Google with Dart and Go) The NSA worked backdoors into RSA encryption. Could the Facebook/Google compilers provide a similar backdoor for them to syphon data? /tinfoilhat
- WalterBright 12y ago
  D is all up on https://github.com/D-Programming-Language https://github.com/D-Programming-Language so I think it'd be kind of hard to sneak things into it.
  - wkdown 12y ago
    I was speaking of the four I mentioned, not D
kilon 12y ago
Programming languages are so previous century. The future is environments that move away from the machine and deep inside the user's mind. Automation taken into extremes.

63 points by rohunati 12y ago

Artemis2 12y ago

Sorry Wired, but you don't build up hype for a language like that.

donpdonp 12y ago

spoiler: the language is D. http://dlang.org/ http://dlang.org/

signa11 12y ago

not sure if D is a stranger in these parts.

gerbal 12y ago

But can it compile to Javascript?

dkarapetyan 12y ago
It's got an LLVM backend so yes. Probably not production ready.
astrodust 12y ago
What can't?
- jarrett 12y ago
  True--in principle any language can be executed in the JS runtime. A lot of them can even be executed reasonably quickly. Though I suppose the parent comment was asking whether a mature compiler from D to JS currently exists.
Zelphyr 12y ago
More importantly, does it contain an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp? If not then I really don't see it having a future.
_random_ 12y ago
Yes, any good language can be obfuscated by converting to JS.
andralex 12y ago
Wierdest thing it's it can: http://goo.gl/88eFzs http://goo.gl/88eFzs

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tdees40 12y ago

D? It's been around for a fairly long time, and it doesn't really have much momentum. I'm not sure why it's "the next big programming language".

srean 12y ago
Right! momentum is the most technically relevant quality of merit. Lets have a wholesome and fulfilling discussion of that aspect in particular. If that fails, lets discuss semicolons, and braces and make this HN story very meaningful and informative. After all that is the kind of discussion I come here for. If an article is crappy lets make the discussion around it crappier still. Shudder at the thought that a discussion could be stimulating even if based on an article less than stellar. Low and middle brow, here we come. Ha! you are fun, searching through my comment history and downvoting old comments still downvotable. Whatever floats your boat.
- JacksonGariety 12y ago
  But the title doesn't say "of merit" it just says "big."
- danmaz74 12y ago
  Unfortunately, technical merit doesn't make anything "the next big thing". High momentum for a prolonged period of time does.
- nitid_name 12y ago
  I imagine a language needs a certain rate of adoption to maintain the amount of programmers actively coding in that language. I feel like the term "momentum" accurately encompasses this idea. >Lets talk about Justin Bieber! I don't understand why you invoked the name of a Canadian popstar. There is no chance of such a comment adding to the discussion.
  - freyrs3 12y ago
    There is a strong argument to be made that software profession does have some resemblance to pop music culture. "[Pop culture] it has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present." Alan Kay 'made this rather salient observation a while back and the more I think about it the more truth I find in it.

noir_lord 12y ago

Has anyone at wired these days actually seen a computer? If they have they should really show it to their journalists.

drcode 12y ago
Certainly! Here is video proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZkJd4u0Us&feature=kp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZkJd4u0Us&feature=kp
- noir_lord 12y ago
  That is perfect!

jbrooksuk 12y ago

Is this because Facebook uses it? D has been round for longer than they seem to be making out.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

Andrei is looking pretty fit these days. Being a research scientist at Facebook is good for your health it looks like.

x43b 12y ago

Previous discussion with 14 comments from 6 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7998144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7998144

rossjudson 12y ago

The phrase "C++ is an extremely fast language -- meaning software built with it runs at high speed" needs to be changed to "It's possible to build high speed software with C++". I take any performance claims made by a particular language with a pretty big grain of salt (particularly those made vs Java/JVM) unless they're accompanied by some reasonably sophisticated benchmarks and source that actually show a performance difference -- not just one that low-level language enthusiasts presume exists.

philosophus 12y ago
Well, I think you could be a bit more specific than that and reasonably say something like "If speed is a high priority for you, then C++ is often a good choice." That's why PC games are generally written in C++.
YZF 12y ago
Here's one: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H... And yes, languages are not slow or fast. The JVM could be as fast or even faster than native (AOT) because JIT can in theory optimize better than AOT. There are fixes planned for performance issues. Things have improved since the benchmark. It's only one particular benchmark. One specific implementation of VM/compilers/etc. Let me show you some badly written code in language X that runs slower than language Y on machine Z. In my opinion JIT is always going to be slower than native (AOT). Maybe the gap will close but fundamentally you can do anything a JIT does AOT at zero run-time cost but not the other way around. That's not a language thing, C++ targetted at a JIT environment (and I think you can target .NET for example) will also run slower and languages that are JITted today could possibly be AOT. The other thing is that if a specific language doesn't allow fine control over memory layouts and data types at the native level and/or if there are inherent costs in the language's design (e.g. duck typing) that is also something that will ultimately prevent it from running as fast as languages that do. That's because you can always build higher abstractions from primitive ones but you can rarely build a primitive one from a higher one. Very smart compilers may be able to identify a "primitive use case" and optimize for that but in general that's a much harder problem.

addflip 12y ago

Whenever I see the story is from Wired I always check the comments to see if it's worth my time more often than not it isn't.

nawitus 12y ago

I think most programmers I know have heard of D. When I took at look at it years ago, I concluded that the main problem was that it tried to please everyone. There's simply 'too many' features without a core theme to drive programming.

srean 12y ago
In a fun and meta sort of way you are saying D has not tried to please you. There are structural problems with this kind of criticism btw I have upvoted your comment, I do share the vision of a small elegant language yet sufficiently powerful language. At the same time I if some parts of D were to be thrown out I would find a way to complain about it. In fact one of my gripes is that it does not have compile time sum types and pattern matching, that and lightweight and efficient fibres (I believe these abstractions still use OS's threading mechanism underneath, I would be very pleased to be proven wrong). The thing is D initially wanted to be C++ done right and then C++ done better. So with that in mind it has to have a lot of features. I do appreciate a lot that D feels a lot more homogeneous and designed rather than built up with unrelenting accretion the like C++. An aspect that I quite like is that if it is not immediately clear what should be the right way to resolve a design problem (for example name clash between function overloading and specialization) the D tendency is to make it into an error till the right solution/semantics emerges. In C++ sometimes the choice is somewhat arbitrary: here we have k choices lets pick one and go with it even if it has nothing obviously convincing going for it. I would like to draw your eye towards templates and template metaprogramming. It really feels bolted on C++, and its really tortuous to use. In D however, although it was added much later it gels very nicely with the rest of the languages. Template metaprogramming is nothing special in D. Its just a function like any other except that it and its arguments are evaluated at compile time. (for D developers reading this, please can we have reference counting for CTFE). So yes you are correct, it has a lot of features, given D's design scope that is hard to avoid, but these features do fit well enough with each other for a practical language to be used in anger, and fit a lot better than its immediate rival C++ / Java.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  You're right in that people often comment that D has too many features, and btw please add X, Y and Z features!

bithush 12y ago

They got it wrong, the next big language is obviously Limbo![0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_programming_language

acomjean 12y ago

The problem with low level languages is they don't live in isolation. As someone who worked on a large project in Ada, you'll need to at some point use the OS and its libraries which for Unix is in C. Want to network or get a OS semaphore? C. Many languages support this call to the C library functionality, but it always seems to force a lot of things back into the C way of doing things. Maybe with a runtime (Java!, or ada tasks) this is abstracted away, but its still there..

jobu 12y ago
Alexandrescu talked about D at Boostcon a few years back, and as I recall he was planning to make it compatible with C system libraries.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  D has been compatible with C libraries since the beginning.
CountHackulus 12y ago
Many of the libraries you'd want to use are already ported or binary compatible (just need a header file) with D. Given that a fibre-based web framework has been written with it, and that it can use pointers natively, there's not a whole lot you can't do with it. Even writing bare metal code should in theory be doable with some work.

russelluresti 12y ago

I read the title of this article and thought "HN is now a parody of HN."

pnathan 12y ago

Last time I looked at D (maybe 6-8 years ago), I saw a C++ reskinned, and two standard libraries, incompatible. Looking at it today, it looks much more modern, but I'm simply not interested. I've drunk the Rust koolaid. :-) (But it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast with a decently sized project for both D and Rust).

drudru11 12y ago

cade metz alert

exacube 12y ago

Man, Facebook has a lot of hookups with Wired. You always see articles on Wired about Facebook projects and tech. relevant: Co-creator of D works at Facebook.

wkdown 12y ago

Let me put on my tinfoil hat for a second. Two companies that love user data are making "languages" for us to write our applications with (Facebook with Hack and React, Google with Dart and Go) The NSA worked backdoors into RSA encryption. Could the Facebook/Google compilers provide a similar backdoor for them to syphon data? /tinfoilhat

WalterBright 12y ago
D is all up on https://github.com/D-Programming-Language https://github.com/D-Programming-Language so I think it'd be kind of hard to sneak things into it.
- wkdown 12y ago
  I was speaking of the four I mentioned, not D

kilon 12y ago

Programming languages are so previous century. The future is environments that move away from the machine and deep inside the user's mind. Automation taken into extremes.