The next wave of programming languages

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/07/the-next-wave-of-programming-l.html

by Anon84 • 16 years ago

108 85 16 years ago

radar.oreilly.com

warfangle2• 16 years ago

Newspeak looks really fascinating. Relavent paper:

http://bracha.org/newspeak.pdf

zephyrfalcon2• 16 years ago

Yeah, but that picture on the website doesn't really make me want to try it, benefits of the language nothwithstanding... :-(

(http://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html)

zephyrfalcon2• 16 years ago

Downvote me all you want, but if I go to a web page and the first thing I see is dead chicken plastered onto a wall, I close that page.

acangiano2• 16 years ago

Don't downvote him. He is absolutely right. The picture on that page is a major WTF and it doesn't offer a great first impression to the visitor interested in the language.

paulgb• 16 years ago

I hate to be critical, but I really wish programming languages would show code samples more prominently. I like how factor does it: http://factorcode.org/

warfangle2• 16 years ago

That's why I linked to the whitepaper, instead of the author's site's entry on the language. Other responses have linked to the project's main page.

Wondering why I got downvoted? Should I have vacuumed it into scribd?

euroclydon6• 16 years ago

I found Kodu very interesting. It's a graphical programming language by Microsoft Labs, that allows kids to create games. It runs on the XBox and uses only the XBox controller.

The XBox part turned me off right away, because that's the last thing I need in my house while we're homeschooling our children, however, I found a free academic version that runs on the PC: http://fuse.microsoft.com/projects-kodu.html

vollmond• 16 years ago

Out of curiosity, why would having an XBox in your home be a problem? I was homeschooled (though only in high school) with several consoles in our house, and it doesn't seem to have been a problem. I wasn't allowed to goof off school time on video games any more than I could have played my Game Boy in a public school classroom.

edit: I suppose a more clear question would be: What is it specific to homeschooling that you don't like about the XBox? Or am I reading too much into your comment?

euroclydon6• 16 years ago

I have a suspicion that "screen time" whether it be TV, videos or games, has a detrimental affect on: attention span, tranquility and susceptibility to advertisements and psychological mass-manipulation in general.

euroclydon6• 16 years ago

I'm trying to avoid constructing the school-time/video-game-time dichotomy because to do so would just mean I was a missionary for consumerism. Think about it: Why should I reinforce to my children, from an early age, that videos and such are fun and learning is not fun; consuming entertainment is what you want to do, and productive work is what you don't want to do, but rather have to do so you then can consume entertainment. That's just the type of people who the captains of industry hope I will introduce into the world: people who will obediently go work for them, only to turn around and consume their products.

acangiano2• 16 years ago

In that list, Clojure is the language that excites me the most. It's a modern, pragmatic Lisp ready for the multiprocessor world. You can do a lot worse than trying it out if you haven't already.

colonelxc• 16 years ago

I was playing with Clojure this last weekend, and so far have enjoyed it. I ran through a dozen or so project euler problems, but am now looking for something that takes longer than 10 lines of code to complete.

HN, what other projects do you do to familiarize yourself with a new language?

joubert3• 16 years ago

Read some of the Clojure code, both in main and in contrib.

DavidMcLaughlin• 16 years ago

I found going through "Introduction to Algorithms" and porting the algorithms in the book to <new language> a great way to get used to a new language.

WilliamLP• 16 years ago

Write a game. ASCII Tetris or Pac Man or Space Invaders would be fine. Whether that is a simple afternoon activity or a somewhat epic undertaking might tell you something about the language.

strlen3• 16 years ago

Lot of people claim that STM in Clojure is the big reason to use it. To me it's been a lot simpler:

a) I want some macros to use for JVM-based projects

b) I like using Emacs + SLIME (it's the best development environment, period).

Unfortunately the noise of Rails fanboys migrating to it with their usual laundry list of complaints ("no IDE support", "no good web framework") is annoying. I have nothing against Ruby in general (in fact I really like the language) and Rails in specific (I know people who love it), but the whole reduction of programming languages to merely web frameworks is a setback for software engineering. That mindset has now been spreading: not only is it impossible to hear about Ruby without "Rails" mentioned next to it, it's now common to hear "Python/Django" and "Scala/Lift".

Web is just a UI layer, a fairly mundane and boring part of an application. Lisp has very little to show for these sorts of applications, but has a lot to show for more science/engineering intensive ones. You hear all the time about webapps being re-written into PHP and other blub languages, but the community is interpreting it as a setback for the languages (and an argument in favour of using blub from the start) rather than the fact that advanced language features make really little difference for web development.

gcampbell• 16 years ago

Are "Rails fanboys" really complaining about lack of IDE support? I was under the impression that IDEs weren't especially popular among Rails programmers (as compared to Vim and TextMate).

10ren• 16 years ago

Though whining is annoying, publicizing a gap - an unsatisfied need - can encourage someone to fill it. a problem is an opportunity

A web framework is still useful, even if many people assess a language purely in terms of it.

gtani• 16 years ago

http://emerginglangs.com/speakers/

Wish i could go.

johkra• 16 years ago

That's indeed very impressive. I hope they are recording and putting the videos online.

AndrejM4• 16 years ago

I've just sent them an email asking this question. Waiting for the reply..

j_baker• 16 years ago

Programming language authors really need to learn how to make a website. Look at Ruby's: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

No long explanations about what it means for Ruby to be a dynamic, object-oriented language. I don't have to read its author's paper or book to get it. Just a short code snippet to show me what it looks like and several links so I can learn more.

Calamitous• 16 years ago

Very much so. I don't get the (apparent) belief that code samples must be hidden at all costs.

If I'm looking at a language, I want to see what it looks like...

Scriptor8• 16 years ago

Only a small number of the language websites listed on the emerging langs camp site have any code on them, and that includes those with maybe just a couple of lines for an edge case scenario.

I guess a bunch of those languages are highly academic and the meat is in the implementation as opposed to the syntax. But language developers need to start putting some effort into the non-code parts of their projects. I'm not going to get inspired to pick up a new language by bullet points. At the same time, I'm working on my own language project so I know it can be challenging to use just the right code to give the best first impression.

AndrejM4• 16 years ago

Although true, many of those authors are too busy with improving/fixing their compilers.

E.g. the D language doesn't have a very modern looking website atm., but someone has took the task to update it recently. It's not up yet since the community is trying it out.

Scriptor8• 16 years ago

The D language actually is an example of a good site, in that there's a large chunk of code on the front page.

billmcneale3• 16 years ago

Another good example: http://fantom.org/

tomjen32• 16 years ago

Man that language is awesome - default nonnulable types, closures, mixins, static _and_ dynamic calls....

I am in love.

davidw• 16 years ago

I think the 37signals guys had a go at fixing it up some, or am I mistaken?

rdtsc• 16 years ago

Interesting languages not on the list:

* io : http://www.iolanguage.com

      Clean, minimalistic, prototype based OO.

* Reia : http://wiki.reia-lang.org

       Ruby-like syntax on Erlang's VM

* Curry : http://www-ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/currywiki

      Functional logic language :  Prolog+Haskell.

* Oz/Mozart : http://www.mozart-oz.org

      Multi-multi paradigm language, includes constraint based programming.

Some of them are not necessarily up-and-coming but rather out-and-going. Oz is interesting, but it seems to be dying. Some like Reia are making slow progress. Curry is more of an academic language. io is probably the most up-and-coming so to speak.

vdoma• 16 years ago

Falcon (http://www.falconpl.org/) seems interesting too.

Scriptor8• 16 years ago

I'm curious, what interesting features does it have?

dublinclontarf2• 16 years ago

Reia is currently my wet dream language, similar to Ruby, and does concurrency(buit on top of BEAM for Christs sakes). And then you read the small print and learn that it's not available as a download. :<

Can't wait until it's ready though.

Scriptor8• 16 years ago

The repo is available at http://github.com/tarcieri/reia

Is it just too unusable right now?

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

Google Go looks interesting too.

http://code.google.com/p/go/

"Go is an expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected systems programming language."

Already in production on some internal projects.

torial• 16 years ago

Cobra (http://cobra-language.com/), a python derivative that also an up and coming language. Love the syntax refinements, the built in unit-testing, contracts, etc... all around a great language.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

I'm genuinely curious: what advantage accrues to a programming language designed for concurrency that you can't get with a good concurrency library for an existing language?

technomancy2• 16 years ago

Immutable data structures are several times more useful if they're built-in to the language because all libraries assume you're using them.

There's no technical reason they couldn't be added on with a 3rd-party library, but it's really a cultural thing.

lukev• 16 years ago

Syntactic support, immutability semantics, and compile-time limitations on side-effects.

Of course, it's POSSIBLE to do everything with a library + discipline. For example, I can import the Clojure jar and use Clojure's data structures and STM in a Java program. But it is _very_ verbose, and you have to know that certain variables are immutable, or that certain operations are illegal in certain places, etc, rather than having that information encoded into the language.

silverlake• 16 years ago

Safety. You can do anything in C, but the language/compiler can't help you at all. So languages with support for a feature can help you perform that task more easily and catch some errors for you. That applies to GC, concurrency, distribution, failure handling, and on and on.

billmcneale3• 16 years ago

Not much, really, the benefits of intrinsic support for concurrency in languages are very overhyped.

Java is a great illustration: it has syntactically close to no support for concurrency (synchronized, pretty much) but it has been able to keep up with today's concurrency challenges by the simple virtue of its libraries (java.util.concurrent is very, very powerful) and ingenuity of its developers.

The amount of concurrent Java that powers major web sites and other places that we don't even know of is simply staggering.

WalterBright2• 16 years ago

I'll be there to talk about the D programming language.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

Interesting, I kinda liked D, but I heard about it years ago and assumed it had died in the meantime.

Good to hear it hasn't.

Edit: I seem to be unable to find the actual license of the digital mars compiler - does anybody know where it is?

joubert3• 16 years ago

I wonder why to Go guys aren't there.

Scriptor8• 16 years ago

They are: http://emerginglangs.com/speakers/

First one in the list :)

stcredzero4• 16 years ago

The dynamic/compiled distinction needs to go away. Combine a simple syntax with very rapid compilation with LLVM, Type Inference, and very advanced emulator-based debugging, and there would be no need to have anything like Smalltalk/Perl/Python/Ruby any more. Instead of dynamic Duck Typing, you'd have Go's version, with auto-magic help from type inference. The emulator-based debugger could subsume many of the capabilities granted by a VM and enable the freewheeling runtime monkey-patching that can be leveraged for the same jaw-dropping ingenious debugging available in many current dynamic langs. This last component would be the hardest to implement.

(Cue the Haskell guys so they can point out how they're most of the way there already.)

joubert3• 16 years ago

The dynamic/compiled distinction needs to go away

dynamic / compiled are orthogonal.

CL is dynamic and gets compiled as you enter in the REPL.

stcredzero4• 16 years ago

Pretty much the same with Smalltalk, but people still make this distinction in their minds. That's part of my point. The distinction no longer even has so much basis in the actual organization of code and runtimes!

pbiggar• 16 years ago

Dynamic/compiled should be orthogonal, but rarely have been in practice. Witness PHP, Perl, Ruby, Lua, Python.

shadowfox• 16 years ago

Can you expand on this a bit?

stcredzero4• 16 years ago

You mean expand on the emulator-based debugger?

motters• 16 years ago

Concurrency should really be the number one issue for any new programming language. To my knowledge, none of the popular languages out there today are really able to handle concurrency in a seamless way which doesn't generate headaches for the developer. Distributing computation over threads and machines needs to be easier.

jashkenas• 16 years ago

The full list of speakers and languages:

    Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer – Go
    Steve Dekorte – Io
    Charles Nutter – Duby
    Matt MacLaurin – Kodu
    Gilad Bracha – Newspeak
    Jeremy Ashkenas – CoffeeScript
    Adam Chlipala – Ur
    Francisco Tolmasky – Objective-J
    Jonathan Shapiro – BitC
    Luke Hoban – F#
    Tav – PyPy
    Rich Hickey – Clojure
    Christopher Bertels – Fancy
    Jonathan Edwards – Coherence/Subtext
    Alex Eagle – Noop
    Slava Pestov – Factor
    Erik Meijer – C#
    Mark S Miller – E, Caja
    Brian Rice – Slate
    Walter Bright – D
    Wolfgang De Meuter and Tom Van Cutsem – AmbientTalk
    Phil Mercurio – Thyrd
    Melvin Smith – Cola
    Carson Gross – Gosu
    Alexander Fritze – Stratified JavaScript
    Alan Eliasen – Frink
    Dan Bornstein – Dalvik
    Steve Folta – Trylon
    Ola Bini – Ioke
    Amos Wenger  - ooc

WalterBright2• 16 years ago

I think I'll stop reading HN and go do something useful!

mkramlich• 16 years ago

Clojure and D are the two languages of the newer wave that I'm most likely to end up using. They each have a combination of elegance and practicality which are pretty rare among new languages I think.

The next wave of programming languages

Related Stories