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Introducing The Heron Programming Language
Christopher Diggins writes "The Heron programming language, is a new general-purpose multi-paradigm programming language in the style of C++ which is starting to make waves. The popular Polish software development magazine Software 2.0 is featuring an article on Heron, in its first English version of the magazine slated to appear in February 2005. A preview of the Heron article is available."
(in reference to the Next Cube)
"In order for people to adopt a new computing platform you can't give them something that is 30% better- You really have to give them something that is 200% better and that is what we failed to see at Next."
I commend the designer of the Heron language for trying to simplify some of the complexity of C/C++ (Just like the D language and Eiffel tried) and some persons may benefit from such a tool. But I fail to see how a language with some minor improvements in contract and aspect-oriented programming support is really offering more than 10-20% improvement in terms of design over vanilla C++ - Not that anyone says it has to, but to truly make waves in the programming world I think a larger advance would really be necessary...
Also, I am skeptical of the practicality of new languages that don't support garbage collection- Garbage collection is just such a huge win in terms of productivity in many programmers' eyes, not to mention its ability to prevent viruses/exploits from buffer overflows. I coudn't imagine adopting a new language that doesn't at least have this one critical feature, even if you carry a tiny performance overhead because of it...
Still, it's always nice to see people working on new ideas in language design!
--Conrad Barski
Let me just say that the last thing you want is to emulate is the style of C++!
Perhaps next you'll tell me it has the speed of Python and the type-safety of perl....
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Note: call it a macro system, or call it a type safe generic metaprogramming facility, or whatever. I don't care, it's still not hygienic. The relevant wording is here.
Gentle Slashdotter, if you are ever to design a programming language, please make sure its scope rules (whether run-time or compile-time) are sane. Thank you.