New Programming Languages Come From Designers

eldavojohn writes "A very lengthy and somewhat meandering essay from Crista Videira Lopes has sparked off some discussion of where new programming languages come from. She's writing from the viewpoint of academia, under the premise that new languages don't come from academia. And they've been steadily progressing outside of large companies (with the exception of Java and .NET) into the bedrooms and hobbies of people she identifies as 'designers' or 'lone programmers' instead of groups of 'researchers.' Examples include PHP by Rasmus Lerdorf, JavaScript by Brenden Eich, Python by Guido van Rossum and — of course — Ruby by Yukihiro Matsumoto. The author notes that, as we escape our computational and memory bounds that once plagued programming languages in the past and marred them with ultra efficient syntax in the name of hardware, our new languages are coming from designers with seemingly little worry about the budget CPU being able to handle a large project in the new language. The piece is littered with interesting assertions like 'one striking commonality in all modern programming languages, especially the popular ones, is how little innovation there is in them!' and 'We require scientific evidence for the claimed value of experimental drugs. Should we require scientific evidence for the value of experimental software?' Is she right? Is the answer to studying modern programming languages to quantify their design as she attempts in this post? Given the response of Slashdot to Google's Dart it would appear that something is indeed missing in coercing developers that a modern language has valid offerings worthy of their time."

Comments

Wrong premise

[Anonymous Coward]

>under the premise that new languages don't come from academia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum :

>Van Rossum was born and grew up in the Netherlands, where he received a masters degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982. He later worked for various research institutes, including the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), Reston, Virginia.

Wrong premise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto

>He graduated with an information science degree from University of Tsukuba, where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers.

Again wrong premise.

Re:Doomed

[TheRaven64]

Pretty much every C compiler with the partial exception of gcc compiles C code into a functional-style imaginary assembly-like language, because that allows more optimization algorithms to work.

Really? Because I've worked on several C compilers, and that's not something I've ever seen. Unless you're talking about SSA form, in which case you're wrong on several counts. First, GCC does use SSA form and has for about five years. Second, SSA form is usually quite restricted: memory is not SSA, for example, so it's not very like a functional style at all. I'm not even going to talk about your conflation of vtables with object orientation.

Re:C isn't dead...yet.

[TheRaven64]

What on earth are you on about? The language has nothing to do with threading, thats down to the OS

Nonsense. Well, sure, if you have 1024 threads doing totally unrelated things then the language doesn't matter, but then you may as well be using separate OS processes and getting some isolation for free.

Back in the real world, threads need to communicate and they need to share data. How the language represents this has a massive impact on scalability.

Re:Examples include

[garaged]

Register_globals was completely removed in the latest PHP version out in the world a couple of days ago