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I could not agree more with your first paragraph. The only other language I've used that I've had that experience with was Haskell, and while there are good arg
by eridius 12y ago
I could not agree more with your first paragraph. The only other language I've used that I've had that experience with was Haskell, and while there are good arguments to be made for using Haskell in production, it should be obvious that's not a language that will ever become mainstream.
I'm hoping that as Swift evolves over time, it will slowly become that sort of language. Right now it's pretty hard to write any real-world code in Swift that doesn't work with the Cocoa frameworks, and the Cocoa frameworks are typed in an objective-c-compatible way (even if new frameworks are written in Swift they'll need to maintain obj-c compatibility), which means you don't get the strong typing that's necessary for this property. Pure Swift code has the potential to behave like this, although you probably need to avoid the ImplicitlyUnwrappedOptional feature (the ! suffix on types), which of course primarily exists for ease of obj-c integration anyway.
I'm bringing up Swift because, with Apple's backing, it's very quickly becoming a "mainstream" language. I put that in quotes because it is only usable with iOS and OS X programming (for now at least), but iOS is large enough that obj-c should be considered a mainstream language despite the fact that almost nobody outside of iOS/OS X uses it, and therefore as Swift supplants obj-c it becomes appropriate to call it mainstream.
Regarding parallelism, I've been in love with Rust for a long time now, and one of the biggest reasons is because Rust makes parallelism safe. As an iOS/OS X programmer by trade, I think thread safety is far and away the biggest elephant in the room. Despite the fact that we've known that multithreading is the future for years, and despite the wonderful Grand Central Dispatch library on iOS/OS X, most programmers still think in a single-threaded mindset and don't even consider how their code should operate if invoked on a separate thread. This was one of my bugaboos with Go back when I was using that language (which was from the day it was announced right up until I discovered Rust, though admittedly my usage was in hobby projects and nothing serious).
I applaud the fact that Go has a data race detector now, which I used to finally uncover a lurking data race that plagued one of my programs for months (and which was ultimately caused by the Go library using two goroutines where I expected one, and therefore data which I expected to be on a single goroutine was actually mutated from two goroutines simultaneously). But I think Rust is absolute proof that a modern language can be designed such that data races are prohibited at compile-time without sacrificing any language flexibility.
- yohanatan 12y ago> I could not agree more with your first paragraph. The only other language I've used that I've had that experience with was Haskell, and while there are good arguments to be made for using Haskell in production, it should be obvious that's not a language that will ever become mainstream. I don't think it is at all obvious that Haskell won't become mainstream. It's already exerted a tremendous influence over many other mainstream languages and there's only so long that can happen before people just start going directly to the source of the innovations (or one of its direct descendants).
- bjz_ 12y agoI have definitely heard from multiple people that for them Rust was a good stepping stone to Haskell. Hopefully it will be the same way with Swift.
- yohanatan 12y agoI think the same is true for F# and Scala.
- emmanueloga_ 12y agoThat may be true but I find it curious. Without knowing too much about Rust, it looks like a lower level language than Haskell. I'd have thought that someone would pick the higher level language first, and go to the lower lever when in need of more control.
- yohanatan 12y agoRust is not your typical lower-level language though. It supports a lot of the features that functional programmers expect. It is an eagerly evaluated language that lets you drop to 'unsafe' code where necessary but in its natural form, it is surprisingly high level.
- ternaryoperator 12y agoI agree Haskell has had an important influence, but I don't see why people would necessarily "go directly" to it because of that. In fact, I would argue just the reverse. People chose the derivative languages b/c they provide things the original does not. To wit, Lisp never became mainstream despite exerting a huge influence. Likewise Smalltalk.