211–220 of 261 posts
Why would you expected a dialect of Lisp to become popular in the Packer's and Pointy Haired Bosses Paradise (a ready-made ecosystem for sweatshops and coding factories of easily replaceable coding drones)? A bit more seriously (which does not mean than anything in the previous paragraph is less true) the Java ecosystem has been grossly oversold from the very beginning, and even Rich himself has been converted (I sti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're golfing... (#(* %1 %2) 6 4)
I wonder, does #(* %1) do anything sensible?
Front page rank #22 (after 18hs) with 208 points and 192 comments on HN on a dying language. Shouldn't be met with a lack of interest?
Some funerals are attended by a large number of people.
I think that only works for concrete things, so in OO that would read: objects can die, classes can't.
Designing an "easy" language is easy because you can usually resort to human intuitions, yours or somebody's else. Everyone can tell your language is easy or not; although there is no single criteria of what is easy, it's still possible to come up with something that many people agree are easy.
Evolving easy languages is also not hard. Just follow the trend and keep making it easy to do whatever just became popular. Statistics, backend development, machine learning, whatever. If some early design choice turns out to be a bad move, just provide alternatives. People don't have very high expectations about the internal coherency of your langauge, so you have much freedom in evolving your language.
Designing a "simple" language is much harder because it requires a very deep understanding of the underlying structure of your runtime environment, the kinds of systems you want to build with the language, and the structure of computer programs in general. Appreciating easiness requires experience and insights, and simple things can appear complex when looking from a different perspective.
Even if you are super smart and came up with a amazingly simple language, that's only the beginning. Sooner or later, whether it's new area of programming or a design mistake surfacing, you need to evolve your language. And that is hard, because blindly adding features will destroy the simpleness and your language degenerates into an "easy" one. Instead, you need to carefully think about the natures of the new requirements, challenge the assumptions underneath the original design, and restructure your design. This process is often slow and can be more challenging than the original design process.
Of course as the article says, "simple" and "easy" is hardly a dichotomy; what I described are extreme cases, and most if not all languages fall somewhere in between and exhibit properties from both sides. But I think it's helpful to think the two dimensions in this way.
> Elm, Elixir, JavaScript, seem to be better at prioritizing the humanistic aspect. Both in the affordances of the software (Elm’s famous error messages), and in person-to-person interactions. Can't stress that enough. I have observed Elixir community and I have to say Jose and others did an excellent job fostering a healthy, friendly and warm community. That is such an essential component. That combined with standin…
I feel that Rich Hickey alone makes the Clojure community very healthy, friendly and warm. The JVM is solid, reliable and battle proven, is it not?
clojure's killer app, datomic, is closed source in my opinion, this is a key reason, why clojure is not thriving i can't think of any (problem) domain, where clojure have a framework or library, than is significantly better than most other frameworks or libraries if you are not number 1 at anything, it is hard to thrive
What is becoming less popular is dynamically typed languages or perhaps more correct to say languages who's types are not statically analyzed at compile time.
So if there is anything hurting Clojure I believe it is the increased uptake of languages with much better type systems than in the past (Scala, Swift, Rust, and even Go).
Particularly Go as clearly it is eating a lot of the jaded JVM crowd (that .NET core should be taking up but for various reasons have not).
Hell even Python is moving towards being more type oriented or at least having support for optional typing.
That being said I think out of all the dynamic languages Lisp, and thus Clojure are the best. I even like Elisp. Its the only time I do like a dynamic language (other than quick shell like scripts) and that is because the runtime is integrated so heavily with the development that essentially you are getting your types constantly checked (as well as auto completion and code lookup).
This was a really well written article. Nice to see the nod to Larry Wall's excellent talk on postmodern languages.
A lot of people who have never used the language sneer at Perl but I worked with it almost exclusively for the first 10 years of my programming career and still have a deep appreciation for the elegance of its design and the great mind that gave birth to it. Perl is the original linguist's programming language, superseded by Ruby, some would argue, which in turn was superseded by Perl6 with its built-in grammars.