Matthew Huntbach takes a long hard look at the coolest language on the planet and is distinctly under impressed by what he sees…
Friday 16 March 2007
by Matthew Huntbach
Tim Sweeney’s talk The Next Mainstream Programming Language (PowerPoint PPT) is in many ways an antidote to the recent Ruby hype. Tim calls for the use of stronger types to ensure program reliability. He praises the academically-developed Haskell functional programming language. He raises concurrency as a feature which must be tackled in the next big programming language, using a better model than the shared state with threads and mutual exclusion devices used by Java - and by Ruby - (...)
Very good article. No offence but while reading the article, I get the feeling that you were biased towards the academic/theoretical/scientific background side of languages (kinda confirmed when I got to your bio and sorry in advance if I’m wrong). Nothing wrong for sure but I believe that there will always be a gap between the labs and the real world. For example, in a perfect object oriented world we wouldn’t have primitives in java. (I believe that decision was for performance reasons at that time but no longer holds true current VM technology.)
With regards to your array a + b example, I think context (‘intuition’ is relative because it is developed through experience) plays a role. If it is known that in language “X” an array is a bunch of pointers to objects then “adding” an apple object to a cone object does not make sense.
I believe people in AI will eventually create the perfect language for programming. Until then, I do not get bothered by people claiming that language "X" is intuitive, elegant, clear, concise, etc. - depending on your background and the surrounding context, it might be true!
