Ask HN: The future of programming languages?

Post by swannodette » Wed, Nov 10, 2010, 8:24 PM UTC

ggchappell wrote: post #38

swannodette wrote: post #12

Topics that I think will be important: - Functional Programming - Logic Programming - Managing asynchronicity - Managing concurrency / Managing state - Pruning bad directions in OO (see the first two) - Type Systems - Virtual Machines Languages/technologies that I would look at more closely given these are Haskell, Scheme, Prolog, Clojure, Qi, LLVM. I love JS but as far languages go, I would not look there for new id…

Both your list and your comments look good, generally, but I have to wonder about your mention of logic programming. I think logic programming has a lot to offer the world, in theory, but in practice it seems to be pretty much dead. True, there is probably more going on with Prolog now than, say, a decade ago. But widespread use is not happening, nor is inclusion of logic-programming features into other languages. Fu…

Post by jimdesu » Thu, Nov 11, 2010, 12:57 AM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #17

Mandatory: http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html And the... result: http://arclanguage.com/

Post by dataangel » Thu, Nov 11, 2010, 2:14 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #10

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #6

I think VMs are the future of application programming, especially as manufacturers become more amenable to using "unconventional" architectures like ARM to host full-featured computers. LLVM, the JVM and the CLR all have benefits- I don't see any reason to believe there will be a convergence in the near future. Environments like .Net and the JVM stack will slowly allow tighter and finer-grained interoperability of th…

Those VM designs are pretty heavily skewed towards class-based OO languages, though. Most VMs have some kind of behavior (polymorphic method lookup, unification, message-passing) that they do very efficiently because of the language they target, but others are omitted. For example, it isn't possible to do real tail-call optimization on the JVM without a trampoline, AFAIK. If it had been created for (say) ML, TCO woul…

Post by EdiX » Thu, Nov 11, 2010, 5:20 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #39

ggchappell wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both your list and your comments look good, generally, but I have to wonder about your mention of logic programming. I think logic programming has a lot to offer the world, in theory, but in practice it seems to be pretty much dead. True, there is probably more going on with Prolog now than, say, a decade ago. But widespread use is not happening, nor is inclusion of logic-programming features into other languages. Fu…

Two visible things to come out of logic programming are Erlang and constraint programming. Both are very significant, in their own niches. I don't think Prolog is dead yet, either.

Post by silentbicycle » Thu, Nov 11, 2010, 6:18 PM UTC

EdiX wrote: post #47

silentbicycle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two visible things to come out of logic programming are Erlang and constraint programming. Both are very significant, in their own niches. I don't think Prolog is dead yet, either.

Erlang is not a logic programming language. They started with a logic programming language and eventually removed every feature that made it a logic programming language.