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It's not about 'not learning anything new'. There are plenty of new concepts in languages that don't use archaic or oddball conventions just for the sake of be
by donw 17y ago
It's not about 'not learning anything new'. There are plenty of new concepts in languages that don't use archaic or oddball conventions just for the sake of being different, especially if there isn't a technology driving the adoption (like there is with Objective C).
Especially in things like Scala; ':=' for assignment is from Pascal, and Ocaml, to me, feels like a really verbose Lisp.
Programmers are much less likely to pick up a new tool if its syntax is so radically different from what they normally work with that there's a steep learning curve just to become accustomed to it.
Sure, both languages have some interesting features, but there really isn't anything driving the change beyond that. Scala lacks a decent web application framework (Lift is rubbish, I'm sorry), and they seem to be targeting that space. OCaml is interesting, but I don't see any major new technology driving its adoption.
- rwmj 17y agoOCaml's syntax is denser than C. There is less to type when you write f 1 2 3 vs f (1, 2, 3), and it gets even better once you look at the larger features like function definitions. Bit surprised you think Lisp is more dense. I just wrote a Lisp compiler in Lisp, and found it more verbose than ML (although only by a little bit). I find the lack of syntax in Lisp very annoying, particularly since it's not necessary -- you can write macros over an AST, which is how camlp4 works.
- jbellis 17y ago> Lift is rubbish Could you elaborate?