Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
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Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#2> We built Repl.it to make it easy to explore and learn languages and programming paradigms. We were, however, surprised by how slow-moving the programming language space seems to be. Given how fast software is growing, shouldn’t we see more innovation in programming languages?
Isn't this like saying: "the construction industry is growing fast, how come there are no new hammers being invented every other week?"
I, too, love to learn new languages that introduce me to new ways of thinking and don't want that influx to dry up, but I don't think it is necessary from the perspective of programming as an industry.
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#3> We built Repl.it to make it easy to explore and learn languages and programming paradigms. We were, however, surprised by how slow-moving the programming language space seems to be. Given how fast software is growing, shouldn’t we see more innovation in programming languages? Isn't this like saying: "the construction industry is growing fast, how come there are no new hammers being invented every other week?" I, to…
I would have never imagined someone saying the PL space is moving slow.
I can’t keep up with all the advances, in practice or research.
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#4> We built Repl.it to make it easy to explore and learn languages and programming paradigms. We were, however, surprised by how slow-moving the programming language space seems to be. Given how fast software is growing, shouldn’t we see more innovation in programming languages? Isn't this like saying: "the construction industry is growing fast, how come there are no new hammers being invented every other week?" I, to…
Nah.
I think you may not understand their intent which is to bring innovation to programming language design.
Language design is one of those "hard" problems that most feel is meant for "rockstar developers" like Rich Hickey or José Valim.
To me, it appears that Repl.it is doing two things with this hackathon:
1. supporting existing language designers creativity
2. encouraging "regular" devs to try their hand at proglang design
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#5> We built Repl.it to make it easy to explore and learn languages and programming paradigms. We were, however, surprised by how slow-moving the programming language space seems to be. Given how fast software is growing, shouldn’t we see more innovation in programming languages? Isn't this like saying: "the construction industry is growing fast, how come there are no new hammers being invented every other week?" I, to…
Nah. I think you may not understand their intent which is to bring innovation to programming language design. Language design is one of those "hard" problems that most feel is meant for "rockstar developers" like Rich Hickey or José Valim. To me, it appears that Repl.it is doing two things with this hackathon: 1. supporting existing language designers creativity 2. encouraging "regular" devs to try their hand at prog…
Based on my extremely biased view from HN, Reddit, and Twitter, it seems like nearly every dev has their own toy language project. The number of language announcements and compiler tutorials on HN is astronomical, several of which are from myself.
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah. I think you may not understand their intent which is to bring innovation to programming language design. Language design is one of those "hard" problems that most feel is meant for "rockstar developers" like Rich Hickey or José Valim. To me, it appears that Repl.it is doing two things with this hackathon: 1. supporting existing language designers creativity 2. encouraging "regular" devs to try their hand at prog…
Based on my extremely biased view from HN, Reddit, and Twitter, it seems like nearly every dev has their own toy language project. The number of language announcements and compiler tutorials on HN is astronomical, several of which are from myself.
But it’s not __approachable__, at least not to me. Seems like survivorship bias to point to nearly every dev with a toy language project. I might feel similarly if I finish nand2tetris
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#7> We built Repl.it to make it easy to explore and learn languages and programming paradigms. We were, however, surprised by how slow-moving the programming language space seems to be. Given how fast software is growing, shouldn’t we see more innovation in programming languages? Isn't this like saying: "the construction industry is growing fast, how come there are no new hammers being invented every other week?" I, to…
I've been coding for almost 20 years now, I definitely saw many changes in that time. Languages like Java and C# became huge, scripting languages like Python or JavaScript became not-just-scripting-languages. C went from "The English of programing languages" to "The Latin of programing languages". Then you have a newer generation starting to take over some niches with the likes of Go, Rust and a few others.
If anything what bothers me is not the lack of innovation in programming languages per se but the relative lack of innovation in program representation. We have high res monitors with incredible graphical capabilities but we still mostly just represent code as flat text files. There've been a few experiments to change the status quo, I remember the Lighttable editor making a bit of a buzz a few years ago, but nothing really changed overall. I wish that a big company like Google, Apple or Microsoft attempted something bold in that space.
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#8Brainf*ck but no Ocaml ?
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#9> We built Repl.it to make it easy to explore and learn languages and programming paradigms. We were, however, surprised by how slow-moving the programming language space seems to be. Given how fast software is growing, shouldn’t we see more innovation in programming languages? Isn't this like saying: "the construction industry is growing fast, how come there are no new hammers being invented every other week?" I, to…
Tools for hammering things have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. They've been optimized so much over that time that it's difficult to improve upon the current designs.
Compared to that, tools for programming are a brand new concept. I don't think the currently-popular languages are anywhere near optimal.
Re: Kicking Off the Repl.it Programming Language Jam
#10Brainf*ck but no Ocaml ?
We started work on it but ran into some issues. It's there but hidden. If someone is an OCaml expert consider contributing to our interpreter interface Prybar.
- https://github.com/replit/prybar
We're also hiring someone to work on languages at Repl.it: https://repl.it/@util/jerbs#open-positions/language_hacker.t...