Lambda the Ultimate

Smalltalk-80 was an important and enlightening experiment in just how far object-orientation can be taken in a programming language. It is simple, compact, and shows a rare and refreshing integrity of concept. To accomplish its goals, it introduces the idea that the variables of a class can be either class variables or instance variables, and the methods can be either class methods or instance methods. This turns the class into a mixture of two fundamentally different concepts—type and module—with very different semantics. Smalltalk manages to do this relatively cleanly.

Unfortunately, two more recent languages, C++ and Java, have taken this same distinction and turned it into a gratuitous mess.

The author is of the opinion that [t]he best-designed languages give you two abstraction tools—a module and an object type—each of which serves its own purpose reasonably well - I wonder if he is thinking about Smalltalk or about Ada...

I guess many people may already know, but the ICFP contest results are out. The judge's prize went to the OCaml people for designing and using AML (Ant Meta Language) as the ant language. In the main division, the second place used C++ and Haskell, and the first place used Haskell exclusively. Might be interesting to look at the language statistics for the submissions.

"I guess we just move in very different circles.". Bingo... the people you know and trust think Java is 'cool,' whereas the people I know and trust think its 'uncool.' Therefore, I see people leaving in droves, whereas you see people coming. So the question boils down to, which group is more reliable in making that judgement? Probably neither... but I'm still going to rant a bit more.

I guess this is related to Graham's Hackers meme. It was almost impossible to argue against Java a couple of years ago, now it is 'officially' uncool...

Which goes to show you that language coolness is much more about community and buzzwords than it is about real language features, right?