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Hard to invent anything new.

by jorgem 17y ago

mahmud 17y ago
Finish the sentence. Hard to invent anything new if you need to keep backward "knowledge" compatibility. Industrial PL design has always been about doing what programmers already know, but gradually "better". Not challenging them and introducing them to new concepts. As far back as the first Fortran; language designers were told to defer to the programmer's expertise, so much so that the #1 requirement for Fortran was to be an algebriac syntax over assembly language. Fortran didn't dare to do anything different than assembly (that job was left to Lisp.) That's why you see dangerous low-level constructs left in every major HLL: this is to allow the previous generation of programmers the freedom to circumvent the abstraction to get work done. It's a subtle admission of distrust of high-level concepts, because management, and studies in "pragmatics" tell us that programmers need to fall back on sheer muscle and primitive operators to deliver quality software. PL designers and compiler hackers can wax poetic over their achievements in advancing the art, but the market prefers to keep its investment in time, money and expertise in current technologies. So what you often see is a lousy compromise between the Ideal and the Material. Inline assembly, longjmp, pointer arithmetic, unboxed immediate values, compiler directives and promises to allow the programmer to tell the compiler how to do it's job, etc. The people behind Go are industrial PL designers; everything they have ever done was for immediate, pragmatic reasons. They cloned Multics to make it cheaper and simpler, doing away with much advanced time-sharing OS research and taking the bare minimum; what they produced was a multitasking OS for minicomputers that wasn't that much more sophisticated than the microcomputer OSes of that day: it was CP/M with a login screen. You can see that theme of "simple, familiar, fast" running through every piece of software tool Bell Labs has ever touched after that. They might appropriated a few technologies from academia, Tcl, SML/NJ, etc. but those were done by researchers brought on board from the outside. When Bell Labs got too ambitious they produced C++, not a change in tone, but a crescendo of everything they have been doing. Worse is Better.
- jrockway 17y ago
  The problem was not that they invented this stuff, but that people took it seriously. Let's break the cycle with Go.

Hard to invent anything new.

by jorgem 17y ago

Hard to invent anything new.

Finish the sentence. Hard to invent anything new if you need to keep backward "knowledge" compatibility. Industrial PL design has always been about doing what programmers already know, but gradually "better". Not challenging them and introducing them to new concepts. As far back as the first Fortran; language designers were told to defer to the programmer's expertise, so much so that the #1 requirement for Fortran was to be an algebriac syntax over assembly language. Fortran didn't dare to do anything different than assembly (that job was left to Lisp.) That's why you see dangerous low-level constructs left in every major HLL: this is to allow the previous generation of programmers the freedom to circumvent the abstraction to get work done. It's a subtle admission of distrust of high-level concepts, because management, and studies in "pragmatics" tell us that programmers need to fall back on sheer muscle and primitive operators to deliver quality software. PL designers and compiler hackers can wax poetic over their achievements in advancing the art, but the market prefers to keep its investment in time, money and expertise in current technologies. So what you often see is a lousy compromise between the Ideal and the Material. Inline assembly, longjmp, pointer arithmetic, unboxed immediate values, compiler directives and promises to allow the programmer to tell the compiler how to do it's job, etc. The people behind Go are industrial PL designers; everything they have ever done was for immediate, pragmatic reasons. They cloned Multics to make it cheaper and simpler, doing away with much advanced time-sharing OS research and taking the bare minimum; what they produced was a multitasking OS for minicomputers that wasn't that much more sophisticated than the microcomputer OSes of that day: it was CP/M with a login screen. You can see that theme of "simple, familiar, fast" running through every piece of software tool Bell Labs has ever touched after that. They might appropriated a few technologies from academia, Tcl, SML/NJ, etc. but those were done by researchers brought on board from the outside. When Bell Labs got too ambitious they produced C++, not a change in tone, but a crescendo of everything they have been doing. Worse is Better.

jrockway 17y ago
The problem was not that they invented this stuff, but that people took it seriously. Let's break the cycle with Go.