Slashdot Mirror
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."
Of course, the first thing I search for in the article is a link that describe the language itself. What a thing to leave out!
(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
Note that Christopher Diggins is both the author of the language and the article submitter. This may affect your perception on whether a new C++like language is really newsworthy.
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.
Heron seems to be aiming at the same market as the D programming language, but IMHO Heron is too much C++-like with all its ugliness.
:)
D is a lot more like Java/C#, but compiled to native code and is low-level enough for it to be used for things like where only C and C++ are feasable now (low-level libraries, toolkits, even kernel drivers).. And besides, there is already a (beta) D Frontend for GCC.
With all the positive attention that D has had recently I find it unlikely that Heron will be chosen over D by anyone, but only time will tell... And the competition is good for both languages.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
will have no trouble deciding what animal to put on the cover of this book.
The wikipedia article on heron was almost deleted. Many wikipedians apparently felt that the language (which only had one user) was not important enough to be "encyclopedic." The vote ended up being against deletion. There's a discussion of it on the article's talk page.
Find free books.