6 ms·

Rich Hickey's Keynote: A deconstruction of object-oriented time [pdf]

147 points by swannodette 17y ago

vdm 17y ago
While I haven't had the opportunity to watch the talk, those slides are fantastic. I think the key to Rich's ideas is to realise them on non-volatile storage. This could revolutionise filesystems and databases.
- jbert 17y ago
  See the 'tux3' linux "phased tree" filesystem which was implemented (and then quashed by NetApp) some time ago (2001): http://www.mail-archive.com/tux3@tux3.org/msg00035.html http://www.mail-archive.com/tux3@tux3.org/msg00035.html I assume that all "snapshotting" filesystems (NetApp, ZFS) have a similar structure? Edit: ah, tux3 is alive: http://tux3.org/ http://tux3.org/, it was tux2 which was quashed. Cool.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 17y ago
    They're all generally similar yes. They're also similar to the naive approaches for tree like persistent data structures. Generally these fall into two approaches: fat nodes and path copying. With fat nodes, each node maintains it's own independent history of update operations. With path copying instead we create a new modified node, and then walk the path from it back up to the parent creating new modified nodes as we go, finally resulting in a new root (uber/super block in a file system). Traversing a particular snapshot in fat nodes is complicated, but is simple with path copying. With path copying however updates are more expensive and we tend to have more duplicate data (depending on the fan out of nodes). Interestingly, we can do better than both of these approaches. I'm not aware of any filesystems that use this schemes, but you may find this paper interesting: http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-854JFall-2005/5092B349-E943-409B-BF53-703BAEF3D8E3/0/persistent.pdf http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Electrical-Engineering-and-C...
    - jbert 17y ago
      I'm currently looking at something which falls under the 'fat node' category (with a few wrinkles/complications) at the moment, so this is of great interest, thanks.
plinkplonk 17y ago
Not to take anything away from Rich's wonderful presentation, but Chapter 3 of SICP covers a lot of this with great clarity and in depth, specifically the OO and functional nature of time and associated subtleties (SICP does not deal with persistent data structures etc). It needs some deep thinking and slow and careful reading to understand all the implications (most students rush through these sections imo), but it provides a good foundation to understand what Rich's talking about.
- IsaacL 17y ago
  I downloaded a copy of SICP last week, and I was thinking about that chapter as I read this presentation. I haven't had a chance to give that section full attention yet, but have the ideas expressed there had much influence on language design? Is Rich's presentation representative of some ideas more advanced than that section of SICP? Or has it been largely ignored over the decades?
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    "but have the ideas expressed there had much influence on language design?" yes! Every imperative(I include OO in "imperative" here) language that allows local computational state, and every functional language trying to maintain referential transparency (and everything in between) embody those ideas, so yes the ideas of dealing with time in computation by local state, streams, pure functions etc are influential in all language design. "Is Rich's presentation representative of some ideas more advanced than that section of SICP?" This is a vague question, (what exactly do you think is "more advanced"? ), but to (try to) answer it, (imo) No, not really, not at the level of ideas. Haskell or Erlang is, for example, as advanced, in terms of ideas, (or more advanced, depending on your pov) than Clojure, for e.g Where Rich has done great (,brilliant!) work is to turn these ideas (and others- see his bookshelf!-,e.g many from lisp, e.g meta programming with macros) into a workable, practical, and beautiful language which interoperates with tonnes of existing libraries. The combination of deep theoretical insight and a ruthless focus on practicality is what (I think) makes Rich Hickey unique. The one aspect of Rich's talk not covered is SICP is the use of persistent data structures, but if you have worked through SICP, you'll instantly understand why this is a great solution and what the potential tradeoffs are. The problems (and advantages!) of state in programming languages and its interwining with time (and therefore concurrency) is clearly laid out in SICP Ch. 3. (Eg. Section 3.4 is titled "Concurrency: Time is of the essence", 3.4.1 is "The Nature of Time in Concurrent Systems" while the language is very clear, it needs repeated reading and deep thougt (imo) to get a good grip on the ideas). Every functional language(e.g Haskell) deals with the "functional" view of time. Every language that allows modelling of local state and loss of referential transparency(all imperative and OO languages afaik) choose the "other path" (some would say the dark side!) of dealing with time in computation. Let me repeat, my post above was not claiming that Rich's talk is valueless or that he is only repeating what SICP said. My point was (only) that a good understanding of Chapter 3 of SICP would be a great background to understanding this talk. Eg: You will understand exactly what he means by OO needing to "stop the world", even without seeing the details on the succeeding slides.
lucifer 17y ago
His observations on the conflation of identity/state/value in OO are very insightful (and I agree with them with the reservation that they apply nearly equally to simple structs of non-OO languages, as well). But the conclusions drawn seem to be yet another attempt at deriving a paradigmatic model (of reality) that is "simplistic" (to borrow his critique of OO). If the object is now to graduate to subject -- a fine idea -- then we should remember that sentient modality of being includes repose, as well as action.
- gruseom 17y ago
  If the object is now to graduate to subject -- a fine idea -- then we should remember that sentient modality of being includes repose, as well as action. Now there's a sentence that gives me a grad school flashback! What on earth (if not the fuck) is the "sentient modality of being"?
  - khafra 17y ago
    I think the light-bringer's saying that, if we extend the analogy between computer language constructs and real-world stuff, we should remember that sometimes people do stuff, and sometimes we don't do stuff.
jayded 17y ago
Brilliant use of ANW's "Process and Reality" (considered by many as a meta-physical text) providing philosophical mappings to Clojure's approach of state, time etc.
- vdm 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_and_Reality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_and_Reality
icey 17y ago
Does anyone know if they recorded this as well? I've heard the Q&A session was also quite good.
- justlearning 17y ago
  i found this (concluding 4 mins): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRTx1oGG_1Y&feature=channel_page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRTx1oGG_1Y&feature=chann... I am thirsty to watch the talk! anyone? torrents?
- johnm 17y ago
  Yes, most of the full talks are being recorded and will be posted.
- scottdw 17y ago
  From the conference page (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/) it seems like the talks were recorded by infoq who recorded last year's talks. If they follow the same method as last year these talks will slowly trickle onto the infoq website over the next few months. See http://www.infoq.com/JVMLanguageSummit http://www.infoq.com/JVMLanguageSummit for last year's talks.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    " ... these talks will slowly trickle onto the infoq website" Do these videos ever appear someplace for easy download, or will they forever be stuck on someone's walled garden?
zaph0d 17y ago
I think Rich Hickey is all set to become one of the most influential figures of Computer Science. The process has already started :)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
baxter 17y ago
I found this fascinating. Does anyone have any knowledge of any other programming languages/environments that focus on time in a way comparable to that suggested in the presentation?
- vdm 17y ago
  http://clojure.org/state http://clojure.org/state http://clojure.org/rationale http://clojure.org/rationale
- zaph0d 17y ago
  Clojure, of course :)
  - baxter 17y ago
    Wow, it seems I have underestimated Clojure! Thanks for enlightening me :)
joechung 17y ago
Time is a global variable (and hence an implicit parameter) to any function that manages state.
- pmjordan 17y ago
  Except the point is that in most languages, it's more than an implicit parameter (like 'this') - it mutates away while the function is running.
  - joechung 17y ago
    I don't think that our points are mutually exclusive (why "except").
    - pmjordan 17y ago
      As I understand it, the point of the presentation was highlighting the incidental complexity arising from the implicit instability of mutable state. If an immutable snapshot of the whole program state was an implicit parameter to functions, that wouldn't be so bad. It's the fact that anything can pull out the rug from under your feet at any time that creates the need for paranoid constructs in most classical concurrent programming.
- jasonwatkinspdx 17y ago
  Except that it's not. Time is relative to each observer. Creating a consistent global view of time requires communication to achieve this consensus. Not just that, we know from FLP that we'll need to use failure detectors and timeouts to simulate a globally synchronous system. This approach (namely Paxos) has such a high performance cost that it's important to understand alternative perspectives that do not require a global clock (in any form). This was the entire point of Rich's talk: that we gain advantages from having a more nuanced model of time.
fauigerzigerk 17y ago
I just wish all the good things were a little bit more memory efficient. Maybe we're getting there eventually...
- vdm 17y ago
  That's the idea of Clojure's persistent data structures. Values share the parts of themselves which haven't changed, so they are not copied. "All of the Clojure collections are immutable and persistent. In particular, the Clojure collections support efficient creation of 'modified' versions, by utilizing structural sharing, and make all of their performance bound guarantees for persistent use." http://clojure.org/data_structures http://clojure.org/data_structures What this does to cache locality, I do not know.
  - fauigerzigerk 17y ago
    I know. I read Stu Halloway's book and I read some articles about how the persistent data structures work. But I also did some tests myself. Performance isn't great but that's not so much the issue for me. Memory use is a problem though. I can't have a list of a million integer pairs take 160MB of RAM.
    - jefffoster 17y ago
      There was some work recently to improve the performance of persistent data structures. See http://clojure.org/transients http://clojure.org/transients Calling (transient x) gives you a mutable copy of x which is created in O(1) time. You can then use functions like conj! and assoc! to modify the data structure in place. When you've finished, call (persistent! x) which returns you to a pure data structure (another O(1) operation).
      - fauigerzigerk 17y ago
        Ok, but that has nothing to do with memory usage, which is my problem with clojure.
    - 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- swannodette 17y ago
  If by hand-waving you mean giving life and meaning to a professional occupation that has been stifled by mediocrity, FUD, and decades long short-sightedness, than I gladly welcome it. As far as pseudo-philosophical, I would direct you immediately to SICP. From the very beginning it points out that the computer can (and SHOULD) represent a beautiful philosophical, even metaphysical, exercise- the understanding of "how things are done". Mr. Hickey isn't pulling things out of the air here, there's a long tradition of scientists (and hackers) attempting to communicate to their peers - "Hey, start treating your practice with some goddamn respect. PLs are not religions. Like music, really, truly, like any art, like any civilization worth continuing - let's keep striving for something better". Perhaps I'm being overly poetic. But if there's no poetry in your work, then what the f&%k is the point of doing it? EDIT: original poster deleted his post. As much as I like Hacker News, I find the fact that people can "game" the karma system by deleting comments clearly destined for down modding lamentable. Perhaps the algorithm for karma should be tweaked so that if you have karma, bravely accepting a brutal down modding for a flawed viewpoint should count for something. That is, if you can't accept being wrong, you probably aren't a hacker worth her/his weight in salt- acceptance of the fact there's always something new to learn should be rewarded after the punishment ;)
  - gruseom 17y ago
    I wrote it. I deleted it, not because I disagreed with what I wrote, and certainly not because I wanted to "game the karma system" (could anything be more asinine?), but because when I took a step back and looked it over, it wasn't a tone I really cared to strike and it didn't seem likely to lead to a good discussion. I often use HN in this way. Something bothers or puzzles me, I don't know what it is, so I write about it until it's out of my system. On rare occasions, I then delete it. Google indexed it, so perhaps my "flawed viewpoint" can be brought back from cache someday for that "brutal down modding". http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gruseom+hickey+pretentious+pseudo-philosophical+deconstruction http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gruseom+hickey+pret... Obviously I wouldn't have deleted my comment if I had seen yours.
vlisivka 17y ago
I saw no new terms to add to my dictionary in that presentation. If you looking for new ideas to add to your language, then look at the world: * hibernate mode decreased computer boot time from minutes to seconds. Is your new supper-pupper language supports that? Can you freeze your program and distribute it in that frozen mode? * web-applications provide instant access to ready to work application. Is your new supper-pupper language supports that? Is your language support instant access, like built-in access to SQL data base or XMLRPC service? * Is Map-Reduce supported directly by your language? * Is your language has support for regular expressions in language? * Can you create parallel constructs with ease, like "foo | bar" in shell? * Did your language supports built-in tree system ("boxes", "DOM", file system, etc.) and ICRUD, XPATH, CSS for these trees? * Can your language automatically take corrective actions in case of error? Like "on SQL error FooBar: rescue database OR restore database from backup OR switch to new database". * Can your code depend on something? Can you write "Class FooBar. Requires application mysql >= 5.0, external resource myapp-application-scheme >= 1.2. Conflicts with module FooBarBaz. Provides fooBarBaz. Obsoletes FooB."? * Can you upgrade your application on the fly without restart and losing data or breaking anything? * Can you compose program without editing files, just by creating and copying of files and directories? (dot-dir pattern) And so on.
xtho 17y ago
OMG programming language design is going postmodern.

147 points by swannodette 17y ago

vdm 17y ago

While I haven't had the opportunity to watch the talk, those slides are fantastic. I think the key to Rich's ideas is to realise them on non-volatile storage. This could revolutionise filesystems and databases.

jbert 17y ago
See the 'tux3' linux "phased tree" filesystem which was implemented (and then quashed by NetApp) some time ago (2001): http://www.mail-archive.com/tux3@tux3.org/msg00035.html http://www.mail-archive.com/tux3@tux3.org/msg00035.html I assume that all "snapshotting" filesystems (NetApp, ZFS) have a similar structure? Edit: ah, tux3 is alive: http://tux3.org/ http://tux3.org/, it was tux2 which was quashed. Cool.
- jasonwatkinspdx 17y ago
  They're all generally similar yes. They're also similar to the naive approaches for tree like persistent data structures. Generally these fall into two approaches: fat nodes and path copying. With fat nodes, each node maintains it's own independent history of update operations. With path copying instead we create a new modified node, and then walk the path from it back up to the parent creating new modified nodes as we go, finally resulting in a new root (uber/super block in a file system). Traversing a particular snapshot in fat nodes is complicated, but is simple with path copying. With path copying however updates are more expensive and we tend to have more duplicate data (depending on the fan out of nodes). Interestingly, we can do better than both of these approaches. I'm not aware of any filesystems that use this schemes, but you may find this paper interesting: http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-854JFall-2005/5092B349-E943-409B-BF53-703BAEF3D8E3/0/persistent.pdf http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Electrical-Engineering-and-C...
  - jbert 17y ago
    I'm currently looking at something which falls under the 'fat node' category (with a few wrinkles/complications) at the moment, so this is of great interest, thanks.

plinkplonk 17y ago

Not to take anything away from Rich's wonderful presentation, but Chapter 3 of SICP covers a lot of this with great clarity and in depth, specifically the OO and functional nature of time and associated subtleties (SICP does not deal with persistent data structures etc). It needs some deep thinking and slow and careful reading to understand all the implications (most students rush through these sections imo), but it provides a good foundation to understand what Rich's talking about.

IsaacL 17y ago
I downloaded a copy of SICP last week, and I was thinking about that chapter as I read this presentation. I haven't had a chance to give that section full attention yet, but have the ideas expressed there had much influence on language design? Is Rich's presentation representative of some ideas more advanced than that section of SICP? Or has it been largely ignored over the decades?
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "but have the ideas expressed there had much influence on language design?" yes! Every imperative(I include OO in "imperative" here) language that allows local computational state, and every functional language trying to maintain referential transparency (and everything in between) embody those ideas, so yes the ideas of dealing with time in computation by local state, streams, pure functions etc are influential in all language design. "Is Rich's presentation representative of some ideas more advanced than that section of SICP?" This is a vague question, (what exactly do you think is "more advanced"? ), but to (try to) answer it, (imo) No, not really, not at the level of ideas. Haskell or Erlang is, for example, as advanced, in terms of ideas, (or more advanced, depending on your pov) than Clojure, for e.g Where Rich has done great (,brilliant!) work is to turn these ideas (and others- see his bookshelf!-,e.g many from lisp, e.g meta programming with macros) into a workable, practical, and beautiful language which interoperates with tonnes of existing libraries. The combination of deep theoretical insight and a ruthless focus on practicality is what (I think) makes Rich Hickey unique. The one aspect of Rich's talk not covered is SICP is the use of persistent data structures, but if you have worked through SICP, you'll instantly understand why this is a great solution and what the potential tradeoffs are. The problems (and advantages!) of state in programming languages and its interwining with time (and therefore concurrency) is clearly laid out in SICP Ch. 3. (Eg. Section 3.4 is titled "Concurrency: Time is of the essence", 3.4.1 is "The Nature of Time in Concurrent Systems" while the language is very clear, it needs repeated reading and deep thougt (imo) to get a good grip on the ideas). Every functional language(e.g Haskell) deals with the "functional" view of time. Every language that allows modelling of local state and loss of referential transparency(all imperative and OO languages afaik) choose the "other path" (some would say the dark side!) of dealing with time in computation. Let me repeat, my post above was not claiming that Rich's talk is valueless or that he is only repeating what SICP said. My point was (only) that a good understanding of Chapter 3 of SICP would be a great background to understanding this talk. Eg: You will understand exactly what he means by OO needing to "stop the world", even without seeing the details on the succeeding slides.

lucifer 17y ago

His observations on the conflation of identity/state/value in OO are very insightful (and I agree with them with the reservation that they apply nearly equally to simple structs of non-OO languages, as well). But the conclusions drawn seem to be yet another attempt at deriving a paradigmatic model (of reality) that is "simplistic" (to borrow his critique of OO). If the object is now to graduate to subject -- a fine idea -- then we should remember that sentient modality of being includes repose, as well as action.

gruseom 17y ago
If the object is now to graduate to subject -- a fine idea -- then we should remember that sentient modality of being includes repose, as well as action. Now there's a sentence that gives me a grad school flashback! What on earth (if not the fuck) is the "sentient modality of being"?
- khafra 17y ago
  I think the light-bringer's saying that, if we extend the analogy between computer language constructs and real-world stuff, we should remember that sometimes people do stuff, and sometimes we don't do stuff.

jayded 17y ago

Brilliant use of ANW's "Process and Reality" (considered by many as a meta-physical text) providing philosophical mappings to Clojure's approach of state, time etc.

vdm 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_and_Reality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_and_Reality

icey 17y ago

Does anyone know if they recorded this as well? I've heard the Q&A session was also quite good.

justlearning 17y ago
i found this (concluding 4 mins): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRTx1oGG_1Y&feature=channel_page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRTx1oGG_1Y&feature=chann... I am thirsty to watch the talk! anyone? torrents?
johnm 17y ago
Yes, most of the full talks are being recorded and will be posted.
scottdw 17y ago
From the conference page (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/) it seems like the talks were recorded by infoq who recorded last year's talks. If they follow the same method as last year these talks will slowly trickle onto the infoq website over the next few months. See http://www.infoq.com/JVMLanguageSummit http://www.infoq.com/JVMLanguageSummit for last year's talks.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  " ... these talks will slowly trickle onto the infoq website" Do these videos ever appear someplace for easy download, or will they forever be stuck on someone's walled garden?

zaph0d 17y ago

I think Rich Hickey is all set to become one of the most influential figures of Computer Science. The process has already started :)

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

baxter 17y ago

I found this fascinating. Does anyone have any knowledge of any other programming languages/environments that focus on time in a way comparable to that suggested in the presentation?

vdm 17y ago
http://clojure.org/state http://clojure.org/state http://clojure.org/rationale http://clojure.org/rationale
zaph0d 17y ago
Clojure, of course :)
- baxter 17y ago
  Wow, it seems I have underestimated Clojure! Thanks for enlightening me :)

joechung 17y ago

Time is a global variable (and hence an implicit parameter) to any function that manages state.

pmjordan 17y ago
Except the point is that in most languages, it's more than an implicit parameter (like 'this') - it mutates away while the function is running.
- joechung 17y ago
  I don't think that our points are mutually exclusive (why "except").
  - pmjordan 17y ago
    As I understand it, the point of the presentation was highlighting the incidental complexity arising from the implicit instability of mutable state. If an immutable snapshot of the whole program state was an implicit parameter to functions, that wouldn't be so bad. It's the fact that anything can pull out the rug from under your feet at any time that creates the need for paranoid constructs in most classical concurrent programming.
jasonwatkinspdx 17y ago
Except that it's not. Time is relative to each observer. Creating a consistent global view of time requires communication to achieve this consensus. Not just that, we know from FLP that we'll need to use failure detectors and timeouts to simulate a globally synchronous system. This approach (namely Paxos) has such a high performance cost that it's important to understand alternative perspectives that do not require a global clock (in any form). This was the entire point of Rich's talk: that we gain advantages from having a more nuanced model of time.

fauigerzigerk 17y ago

I just wish all the good things were a little bit more memory efficient. Maybe we're getting there eventually...

vdm 17y ago
That's the idea of Clojure's persistent data structures. Values share the parts of themselves which haven't changed, so they are not copied. "All of the Clojure collections are immutable and persistent. In particular, the Clojure collections support efficient creation of 'modified' versions, by utilizing structural sharing, and make all of their performance bound guarantees for persistent use." http://clojure.org/data_structures http://clojure.org/data_structures What this does to cache locality, I do not know.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  I know. I read Stu Halloway's book and I read some articles about how the persistent data structures work. But I also did some tests myself. Performance isn't great but that's not so much the issue for me. Memory use is a problem though. I can't have a list of a million integer pairs take 160MB of RAM.
  - jefffoster 17y ago
    There was some work recently to improve the performance of persistent data structures. See http://clojure.org/transients http://clojure.org/transients Calling (transient x) gives you a mutable copy of x which is created in O(1) time. You can then use functions like conj! and assoc! to modify the data structure in place. When you've finished, call (persistent! x) which returns you to a pure data structure (another O(1) operation).
    - fauigerzigerk 17y ago
      Ok, but that has nothing to do with memory usage, which is my problem with clojure.
  - 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

swannodette 17y ago
If by hand-waving you mean giving life and meaning to a professional occupation that has been stifled by mediocrity, FUD, and decades long short-sightedness, than I gladly welcome it. As far as pseudo-philosophical, I would direct you immediately to SICP. From the very beginning it points out that the computer can (and SHOULD) represent a beautiful philosophical, even metaphysical, exercise- the understanding of "how things are done". Mr. Hickey isn't pulling things out of the air here, there's a long tradition of scientists (and hackers) attempting to communicate to their peers - "Hey, start treating your practice with some goddamn respect. PLs are not religions. Like music, really, truly, like any art, like any civilization worth continuing - let's keep striving for something better". Perhaps I'm being overly poetic. But if there's no poetry in your work, then what the f&%k is the point of doing it? EDIT: original poster deleted his post. As much as I like Hacker News, I find the fact that people can "game" the karma system by deleting comments clearly destined for down modding lamentable. Perhaps the algorithm for karma should be tweaked so that if you have karma, bravely accepting a brutal down modding for a flawed viewpoint should count for something. That is, if you can't accept being wrong, you probably aren't a hacker worth her/his weight in salt- acceptance of the fact there's always something new to learn should be rewarded after the punishment ;)
- gruseom 17y ago
  I wrote it. I deleted it, not because I disagreed with what I wrote, and certainly not because I wanted to "game the karma system" (could anything be more asinine?), but because when I took a step back and looked it over, it wasn't a tone I really cared to strike and it didn't seem likely to lead to a good discussion. I often use HN in this way. Something bothers or puzzles me, I don't know what it is, so I write about it until it's out of my system. On rare occasions, I then delete it. Google indexed it, so perhaps my "flawed viewpoint" can be brought back from cache someday for that "brutal down modding". http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gruseom+hickey+pretentious+pseudo-philosophical+deconstruction http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gruseom+hickey+pret... Obviously I wouldn't have deleted my comment if I had seen yours.

vlisivka 17y ago

I saw no new terms to add to my dictionary in that presentation. If you looking for new ideas to add to your language, then look at the world: * hibernate mode decreased computer boot time from minutes to seconds. Is your new supper-pupper language supports that? Can you freeze your program and distribute it in that frozen mode? * web-applications provide instant access to ready to work application. Is your new supper-pupper language supports that? Is your language support instant access, like built-in access to SQL data base or XMLRPC service? * Is Map-Reduce supported directly by your language? * Is your language has support for regular expressions in language? * Can you create parallel constructs with ease, like "foo | bar" in shell? * Did your language supports built-in tree system ("boxes", "DOM", file system, etc.) and ICRUD, XPATH, CSS for these trees? * Can your language automatically take corrective actions in case of error? Like "on SQL error FooBar: rescue database OR restore database from backup OR switch to new database". * Can your code depend on something? Can you write "Class FooBar. Requires application mysql >= 5.0, external resource myapp-application-scheme >= 1.2. Conflicts with module FooBarBaz. Provides fooBarBaz. Obsoletes FooB."? * Can you upgrade your application on the fly without restart and losing data or breaking anything? * Can you compose program without editing files, just by creating and copying of files and directories? (dot-dir pattern) And so on.

xtho 17y ago

OMG programming language design is going postmodern.