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Designing And Building A New Pragmatic Language

Posted by timothy on from the good-seats-are-still-available dept.

ctrimble writes "A bunch of folks on the pragprog Yahoo! Group have banded together to design and implement a 'pragmatic' programming language. Ostensibly, the language is informed by the principles in Hunt and Thomas's well-received book, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master but the purpose of the language is to help ease some of the pain of development and bridge the impedance mismatch between the academic aspects of a programming language and the discipline of software engineering. The design is still very much in flux. If you're a programmer, this might be a language you'll be using in a few years (or earlier). This is your chance to get in on the ground floor. What kind of features do you want the language to have? What are your PL pain points? Where could this language do better than existing languages?"

2 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What about a graphical language by crmartin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I actually did my PhD and Masters' work with the idea originally being to develop a visual or direct-manipulation (see Ben Schneiderman's stuff if you don't know the term) programming environment. You know what happened? I went to Fred Brooks' original "No Silver Bullet" presentation (see the paper to see the details) and found that I couldn't manage to refute his arguments. (I hate it when that happens. :-)

    The basic argument is this: are the complexities of notation (language, whatever) essential or accidental aspects of the difficulties in programming? Brooks' argument is that the notation is an accidental issue -- that you can't gain, say, an order of magnitude improvement by chaning notation alone.

    This is clearly not 100 percent true 100 percent of the time -- "drawing" a GUI with something like Powerbuilder, Eclipse, or JBuilder is clearly a lot more effective than coding it, even with EMACS. On the other hand, in real industrial development, actual coding is only about 15 percent of the total time and cost invested -- so no matter how wonderful the language is, it can't possibly account for more than about a 15 percent improvement.

  2. The 100 year language by t482 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think that Alan Kay was way ahead of his time - getting kids to program. I think much like the spreadsheet revolutionized office work by allowing dynamic analysis of data the next big language will be one that is simple enough to allow average office workers to speed up and automate their own work. Abstraction is key.

    VBA is being used currently for a lot of that work - but it is truly horrible. Wharton has started teaching its MBA students Python.

    Check out what Paul Graham has to say about programming languages in 100 years (basically they won't change much).
    http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
    And Artima had a discussion on this topic, "After Java and C# - what is next?". http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread= 6543