41–50 of 75 posts
I keep thinking that the Next Big Language will be a thing of re -evolution, e.g. someone going back to C and retracing steps of C++ but in a more sensible way. Also, on a tangential note -- the garbage collection is a huge deal if an adoption of the NBL among C/++ programmers is considered. The only way is to have the garbage collection optional. Similarly to how D has it, but much much simpler. Something like addin…
I didn't realize how old this was, which tells you something about how prescient Yegge's writing can be. I would have added "pattern matching", though. At a minimum, keyword arguments or syntactic sugar for them.
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While I'm not sure Scala is the Language of the Future™, it's relevant to this discussion to point out that the method_missing hacks that make ruby's dynamic typing so attractive are being actively prototyped in Scala. An example snippet: https://gist.github.com/783394 The implementation: http://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/changeset/23993
For what it's worth, and a bit OT, I find method_missing to be the least appealing part of Ruby's runtime dynamism. What _is_ helpful is to be able to add methods on the fly (e.g., through define_method); on the other hand, being able to handle arbitrary messages (which is what method_missing does) is occasionally interesting (as with Rails' dynamic finders) but generally considered bad form given that there are clea…
I didn't realize how old this was, which tells you something about how prescient Yegge's writing can be. I would have added "pattern matching", though. At a minimum, keyword arguments or syntactic sugar for them.
He mentions "Perl 5 compatible regular expression literals" under "kitchen sink"
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Scala would be a fucking awesome mainstream language.
And it actually has a chance of achieving that, unlike Haskell/Erlang/Ocaml/whatever, because Blub developers can just use it as a better Java.
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He mentions "Perl 5 compatible regular expression literals" under "kitchen sink"
Pretty sure the GP is referring to pattern matching as it exists in ML or Scala. Or, somewhat less elegantly (given the constraints of the language) something like what https://github.com/jfd/match-js does.
What is Steve Yegge doing nowadays? Is he still at Google?
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How was that a great guess? Certainly things could change, but very very very few people are doing server side JS right now. That could change, but I'm still pretty skeptical. Node.js (if that's what you're thinking of) is still very much in the experimental stage.
He doesn't say it will be ubiquitous in that timeframe. You'd have to be pretty crazy to think that. He means it will arrive. Which is correct. The thing is, javascript is what's available in all devices. And it's a pretty nice language.
Ahh... I think we all miss Big Stevey. He role was never replaced and it's a shame for our entire community. I'm glad this was posted. It was written four years ago (Feb. 2007), and his quote is, "[The NBL] is going to arrive very soon (timeline: 18-24 months ...)" He later gave away that he was thinking the NBL was to be server-side Javascript. You have to hand it to him; that was a great guess, even if the timeline…
How was that a great guess? Certainly things could change, but very very very few people are doing server side JS right now. That could change, but I'm still pretty skeptical. Node.js (if that's what you're thinking of) is still very much in the experimental stage.
http://developer.palm.com/index.php?id=2109 http://www.google.com/search?q=palm+feb+9
You certainly wouldn't want that to happen - I hear they still program in Pearl there.