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Lightweight Languages
Denise writes: "'What happens if you get a bunch of academic computer scientists and implementors of languages such as Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Curl, and lock them into a room for a day? Bringing together the academic and commercial sides of language design and implementation was the interesting premise behind last weekend's Lightweight Languages Workshop, LL1, at the AI Lab at MIT.' Simon Cozens report, on perl.com, says it wasn't the flame fest you might have imagined."
Interesting weekend! Here's the summary in case you can't get on, (or if you're lazy!)
As I've indicated, the interest of the workshop was as much what was going on outside the talks as well; Dan and I got to meet a load of interesting and clever people, and it was challenging for us to discuss our ideas with them - especially since we didn't always see eye to eye with our academic counterparts. Sadly, few people seemed to have heard much about Ruby, something they will probably come to regret in time. Dan seemed to have picked up a few more interesting technical tips, such as a way to collect reference count loops without walking all of the objects in a heap. Oh, and we found that you should pour liquid nitrogen into containers first rather than trying to make ice cream by directly pouring it into a mix of milk and butter. And that the ice-cream so produced is exceptionally tasty.
But seriously, what did we learn? I think we learned that many problems that we're facing in terms of Perl implementation right now have already been thoroughly researched and dealt with as many as 30 years ago; but we also learned that if we want to get at this research, then we need to do a lot of digging. The academic community is good at solving tricky problems like threading, continuations, despatch and the like, but not very interested in working out all the implications. To bring an academic success to commercial fruition requires one, as Olin Shivers puts it, "to become Larry Wall for a year" - to take care of all the gritty implementation details, and that's not the sort of thing that gets a PhD.
So the impetus is on us as serious language implementors to take the time to look into and understand the current state of the art in VM research to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Conferences such as LL1, and the mailing list that has been established as a result of it, are a useful way for us to find out what's going on and exchange experience with the academic community, and I look forward intently to the next one!
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
This is just the sort of discussion I like to see happening. Not a "my language is better than yours" bout, but a frank examination of what makes a language good, and what makes it better.
I get very tired of the "X is better than Y" fights. They're pointless, and if this collection of language pros can avoid it, so can we. The better language is the one that gets the job done best for you, period.
Rather than clinging to our cliques, getting together with users and creators of other languages is beneficial to everyone. Hybrid vigour, if you like.
It's this sort of cooperation the open source movement in particular should embrace, not petty squabbles over syntax preferences. In the end, everyone should win.
any similar conference i've ever been to (including some W3C working sessions) have been extremely professional, even when working on standards. IMO the only time you get flamefests is on the internet on boards/newsgroups populated by wannabes who don't fully understand what they're flaming about, and the flames are pretty much just a front to cover their lack of knowledge/experience. on the other hand, stick a bunch of knowledgable people in the same room, and considerable respect for each other is shown.