Lambda the Ultimate

...at Language Design Docs.

This discussion over on the Haskell Mailing List might interest those readers following the debates on concurrency issues in the discussion group...

Here is part of a discussion from the "Language Smiths" discussion group that I thought might be of interest to some here:


From: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/langsmiths/message/2281




--- In langsmiths@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Ehrenberg

> What are your goals with this language? Are you trying

> to be popular, or are you trying to make a good

> language?

My goals are probably the same as just about every other language
designer: to create a better language for me to create the types of
programs that I typically need to create. What is perhaps slightly
different for me is the types of programs that I typically need to
create. I write large enterprise class applications for: financial
institutions, the telecom industry, huge inventory systems, CRM and
e-commerce. This is probably the sort of thing that about 90% of the
world's programmers work on I'm guessing. (In short: the types of
programs that nobody would every write for fun.) The types of
programs that I write a far too large for me to write on my own so I
need to make my language acceptable to the masses if I want to be able
to use it. As a result, I want to make a language which is useable by
90% of the worlds' programmers (and some percentage of the world's
non-programmers). Language experts design languages for their own
needs, and because they're always writing languages, we end up with
many languages which are excellent for language experts to write
languages in. Languages for their own needs and for their own kind.
Unfortunately, the offerings for non-language designers to create
non-languages in, is drastically under-served.

Computer languages are actually for people, not computers. The
computer is happy with machine code. If you make something which is
for people but then most of the people don't like it, then you've
failed. Could you imagine a Chef saying "do you want me to make good
food, or food that people like?" It sounds like a ridiculous thing
to say in the context of food (or clothing, or anything else
supposedly designed for people) and yet it seems to be the common
belief in the design of programming languages.

I wouldn't say that being "good" and being "popular" are mutually
exclusive. A popular language is more likely to have better compilers
and tools, be available for any particular platform, and more likely
to have some desired functionality already implemented by someone
else. Pragmatically, a language which lets me *not* write something
because it has already been written by someone else, is better than a
language which lets me write it any number of times faster. I'm more
likely to be able to buy a book about a popular language, or to write
a book about a popular language and get paid for it. I'm more likely
to be able to find a job or conversely to hire developers for a
popular language. Popularity is a feature, and in many cases, the
most important one.