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Blow wants to optimize for (developer) speed and simplicity over memory safety - roughly, "Go's simplicity, minus garbage collection" instead of what he calls "
by chipsy 12y ago
Blow wants to optimize for (developer) speed and simplicity over memory safety - roughly, "Go's simplicity, minus garbage collection" instead of what he calls "big idea" languages. Which I would never go for myself, but he's very adamant on this point; he dismisses most new ideas in PL theory entirely in favor of focusing on the engineering problem of smoothing out basic issues seen in his existing C++ development environment, where, to paraphrase him, "everything is junk and it demoralizes me". In that respect there's plenty we could learn from this project and its whole-process agenda, even if it isn't introducing sexy new methods. There are very few PL projects that aim only to work on boring everyday problems.
- lobster_johnson 12y agoI don't think Blow is against big ideas as such -- his language has some big ideas on its own -- but he certainly seems to prefer familiarity and simplicity over mind-altering language-theoretical weirdness. One aspect of familiarity, incidentally, is being able to hire junior devs. I see that as being a problem with Go -- and, in the future, Rust -- not to mention rocket-scientist languages like Haskell, Ocaml or even Scala, or indeed C++. Go is "simple", but not really that simple, not compared to Ruby or Python. (Of course, this might not be an issue for Blow, whose company is already using C++.) While Blow was originally talking about safety not being a paramount issue, I believe he has mentioned ownership-lifecycle management, possibly something like Rust's borrowing, as being on his mind.