The Next Big Language • Hacker News Board

Re: The Next Big Language

#71

Post by huhtenberg » Thu, Jan 27, 2011, 4:51 PM UTC

p0nce wrote: post #70

huhtenberg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. malloc'ed item could be the same as malloc_gc'd, but with its reference count artificially bumped up by 1. free() would decrement the count and the item will be picked up by the GC later on. If there's a provision for an immediate disposal of unreferenced items, then we are back to the standard malloc/free behaviour in case when malloc and malloc_gc items are not mixed.

Reference counting is a bad C++ substitute for a real GC.

Sure, absolutely. Just as C++ is a bad substitute for a real language.

(edit)

Re: The Next Big Language

#72

Post by kaffiene » Thu, Jan 27, 2011, 8:06 PM UTC

gtani wrote: post #35

nagnatron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala would be a fucking awesome mainstream language.

Nobody talked about F# here but it's clearly the CLR Next Language, and reasonably f&(*ing awesome; i.e. combines the Next Languageness of clojure, jruby, and scala from the JVM world. Invitably, people will raise the same "broad and deep syntax" complaints they level against scala

I've looked at it and thought it looked like a very clean and (for a functional language) quite readable. But the ties to MS's VM dooms it IMO. If they made it cross platform (JVM and / or native compilation) and put it in third party hands, then it might stand a chance.

BUT, I can't see Joe Public programmer adopting a functional language, even one as nice as F#

Re: The Next Big Language

#73

Post by harryh » Sat, Jan 29, 2011, 8:05 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #48

yesbabyyes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's also showing up in other things. I believe KDE is using it as the primary scripting language for their stuff. Apple has dipped it's toe in that water with the dashboard widgets. etc

Another good example is Google using it for their scripting project for Google Docs. Works using Rhino on the JVM.

I used to work on this project. It's pretty rad from a tech standpoint.

Re: The Next Big Language

#74

Post by flitzwald » Sun, Jan 30, 2011, 2:44 PM UTC

kevinburke wrote: post #38

What is Steve Yegge doing nowadays? Is he still at Google?

This is a recent talk by him about scalable programming language analysis. And yes, he's still at google.

http://vimeo.com/16069687

Re: The Next Big Language

#75

Post by skariel » Sun, Feb 06, 2011, 9:48 AM UTC

gaspard wrote: post #28

The NBL is not going to be Javascript but Lua. It's got some of the same architectural strengths as Javascript (functions are first class citizens, closures, good scoping), it's very fast (LuaJIT), integrates well in any environment and is highly customizable. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1022560/subtle-difference... for some differences....

but LUA does not have any STATIC features. This is really essential for writing large apps.