The latest entry has Joe Armstrong discussing Erlang in the ongoing series of interviews with PL designers (The A-Z of Programming Languages). Two related things caught my eye. The first is the obvious truism about language features:
Removing stuff turns out to be painfully difficult. It's really easy to add features to a language, but almost impossibly difficult to remove things. In the early days we would happily add things to the language and remove them if they were a bad idea. Now removing things is almost impossible.
The other thing that I found intriguing was his mention of integrating version control into the language:
We have mechanisms that allow the application software to evolve, but not the language and libraries itself. We need mechanisms for revision control as part of the language itself. But I don't know how to do this. I've been thinking about this for a long time. Instead of having external revision control systems like Git or Subversion I'd like to see revision control and re-factoring built into the language itself with fine-grain mechanism for introspection and version control.
Not sure what he has in mind?
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