4 ms·
I'm the Bruce that he mentioned in the post. For better or worse, I've been pushing Dylan forward heavily over the last few years and am effectively the primar
by BruceM 12y ago
I'm the Bruce that he mentioned in the post.
For better or worse, I've been pushing Dylan forward heavily over the last few years and am effectively the primary maintainer.
Over the last couple of years, we've made a lot of progress. We've completely revived the documentation from 1990s era FrameMaker files and have it published via a pretty modern system. We've converted from SVN to Git and moved to GitHub. We've done 4 actual releases. We've improved our platform portability. We've provided some basic debugging integration with LLDB. We've fixed some long standing issues in the compiler and tool chain. We've improved the GC integration on all platforms.
But there's a lot to do. We need to fix our Unicode support. We need to improve the type system in at least minor ways if not major ways. We need to improve how parse failures are handled as the errors are not always friendly. We need more libraries. Some of this is really easy, some isn't. But for pretty much everything, there are bite-sized pieces of work that could be done in a couple of hours/week that would lead to significant gains.
I've wanted to just flat out use Dylan for something and have built some small prototypes with it and while they've worked out well enough, the actual projects themselves didn't go anywhere (unrelated to the use of Dylan).
I think this blog post was triggered by a comment that I'd made publicly yesterday that I'm feeling rather discouraged at this point. There was also a private email that I sent to 19 people who have been involved with Dylan recently, but the author of this post didn't get that email.
I view Dylan, not as a language from the past, but as a stepping ladder towards building a better language for the future. We don't have to get bogged down in a lot of the minutiae involved in creating a new language as a lot of the work has been done. We get to focus on things at a different level and those things are just as important. People bring up Goo often when Dylan comes up. Goo is interesting, but the implementation is nothing close to being industrial enough to survive an encounter with the real world.
I came to Dylan because I saw the mess that Scala and other languages were. I didn't like where they were going and following some people on Twitter like https://twitter.com/milessabin https://twitter.com/milessabin and others seems to show that I'm not alone.
And that's why I'll probably keep at it with Dylan. I want a better future and I'm going to keep trying to build it.
- justinpombrio 12y agoIt sounds like you care not only about Dylan but also about advancing programming language construction in general. Have you considered writing, e.g., blog posts about design decisions you make as you work on Dylan? Maybe it would help other people learn from your work.
- BruceM 12y agoI do ... and I post on http://dylanfoundry.org/ http://dylanfoundry.org/. I don't usually bother to post them on HN as I don't have the time to try to get something on the front page (otherwise, no attention). I do post them on r/lisp though or lobste.rs usually. I've got a couple of posts in draft stage now that I hope to publish this week or next.
- klibertp 12y agoThank you for your work and please, please keep working on Dylan. A couple of years back I wanted to learn Dylan, but it really looked rather old and unfriendly. I read about Dylan module system and object system and thought it's really interesting. My first impression was that it's somewhat similar to Racket units system and to CLOS. I hoped for Dylan to be modernized enough to make it easier for me to learn it. I forgot about it as I learned a dozen or so new (or old) exciting languages in the meantime, but seeing improvements in Dylan - especially in the docs - makes me interested in it once again. > there are bite-sized pieces of work that could be done in a couple of hours/week that would lead to significant gains How to get involved with it? Are there issues on Github, is there a mailing list? Free time is scarce, but if I finally decide to learn Dylan I can help with its development as well. Again, please don't stop working on Dylan. It's only natural for such a language to have a small user base, it's nothing to be worried about. Just keep working on it and sooner or later it will become (more) popular. That's my experience with various niche languages to date, at least.
- vijucat 12y agoBruce, not sure if you are interested in commercial success, but assuming you are, one suggestion is : whatever you may feel about Scala, I believe that Martin Odersky had the right strategy when he noted that Object Oriented Programming did well despite it's flaws because people could build real, working things with OO languages. This probably holds true even more for PHP. So my suggestion is to do the same for your language : build a cool, new mp3 player that reminds folks of the days when WinAmp was so awesome. Or build a scalable server-side framework that makes WhatsApp-scale chat easy as pie. Make it easy for folks to achieve commercial success, and your language will thrive, too.
- bsaul 12y agoSince you seem very qualified to critize a PL, could you elaborate on the problems you see with scala ? I recently had to study the option of starting a real project with this language, but after looking at it, it didn't feel like an elegant and well thought out language. More like a monster language people tried to stuff as many features as they could into. But that was just a first glance impression. So i'm really wondering what someone like you think of it.