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Holy cow, that's my USENET posting. Will have to ask my sysadmin to record the HN spike. I do find it funny reading postings here basically saying that, regar

Holy cow, that's my USENET posting. Will have to ask my sysadmin to record the HN spike. I do find it funny reading postings here basically saying that, regardless of what Patrick Naughton said, his language is actually based on C++. Those language creators have some nerve! :-) Reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut scene in Back to School. Even back in the '90s, when I wrote that as a wee PhD student, it was clear that Java was derivative of Obj-C (among others) much more than C++. EDIT: all the Newton references in that passage are because it was posted in comp.sys.newton.misc (IIRC).

jayvanguard 11y ago
Yes, it was a well known fact back then. I'm sure I heard talks or articles from Gosling, Guy Steele, and others that explicitly said this as well.
MCRed 11y ago
And Objective-C is a derivative/recreation/highly inspired by SmallTalk. But my question is, what modern language today is a copy of Dylan?
- pavlov 11y ago
  None of them, unfortunately? (Unless I'm forgetting something.) Of the languages created at Apple, Dylan was the most interesting one. Swift is practical in many ways, but it's not inspired or visionary. Swift is basically a better C++ with decent Cocoa interop built-in. It's comparable to C# in originality... And that's not putting down either Apple or Microsoft -- it's simply the realities of creating a language at a large corporation with internal and external stakeholders.
  - Retra 11y ago
    I don't think 'originality' should be the goal of any language. Being novel for the sake of novelty inhibits effective communication, it doesn't enhance it.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      Originality is a virtue if the language really has a better way of solving certain problems that people face. Even if it has merely a different way of solving certain problems, that may be very worthwhile, because the different way may in fact turn out to be better. But novelty just for the sake of novelty... yeah, not so much.
- yarrel 11y ago
  Dylan is - http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/ :-)
- jghn 11y ago
  R's S4 oop system is deeply inspired by Dylan

jayvanguard 11y ago

Yes, it was a well known fact back then. I'm sure I heard talks or articles from Gosling, Guy Steele, and others that explicitly said this as well.

MCRed 11y ago

And Objective-C is a derivative/recreation/highly inspired by SmallTalk. But my question is, what modern language today is a copy of Dylan?

pavlov 11y ago
None of them, unfortunately? (Unless I'm forgetting something.) Of the languages created at Apple, Dylan was the most interesting one. Swift is practical in many ways, but it's not inspired or visionary. Swift is basically a better C++ with decent Cocoa interop built-in. It's comparable to C# in originality... And that's not putting down either Apple or Microsoft -- it's simply the realities of creating a language at a large corporation with internal and external stakeholders.
- Retra 11y ago
  I don't think 'originality' should be the goal of any language. Being novel for the sake of novelty inhibits effective communication, it doesn't enhance it.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Originality is a virtue if the language really has a better way of solving certain problems that people face. Even if it has merely a different way of solving certain problems, that may be very worthwhile, because the different way may in fact turn out to be better. But novelty just for the sake of novelty... yeah, not so much.
yarrel 11y ago
Dylan is - http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/ :-)
jghn 11y ago
R's S4 oop system is deeply inspired by Dylan