Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 75 posts

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#31

Post by tdees40 »

srean wrote: post #10
tdees40 wrote: post #7

D? It's been around for a fairly long time, and it doesn't really have much momentum. I'm not sure why it's "the next big programming language".

Right! momentum is the most technically relevant quality of merit. Lets have a wholesome and fulfilling discussion of that aspect in particular. If that fails, lets discuss semicolons, and braces and make this HN story very meaningful and informative. After all that is the kind of discussion I come here for. If an article is crappy lets make the discussion around it crappier still. Shudder at the thought that a discu…

I'll bite: a relevant technical question would be: is D really that much better than C++11 that you should abandon C++ (with all of the consequences that would have on tooling/libraries/etc.)?

I think D made more sense pre-C++11.

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#32

Post by jarrett »

tdees40 wrote: post #7

D? It's been around for a fairly long time, and it doesn't really have much momentum. I'm not sure why it's "the next big programming language".

Apparently it's being used at Facebook. If they actively injected life into the D ecosystem to the same extent Google does with Go, the momentum might pick up substantially. Look at how late Go arrived--it was announced in 2009--and how popular it already is. Now, that doesn't mean Go or D can necessarily become the next big thing, i.e. the C++/Java killer. But even if they got as far as Python or Ruby, that would be a significant change to the programming landscape.

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#33

Post by acomjean »

The problem with low level languages is they don't live in isolation.

As someone who worked on a large project in Ada, you'll need to at some point use the OS and its libraries which for Unix is in C. Want to network or get a OS semaphore? C. Many languages support this call to the C library functionality, but it always seems to force a lot of things back into the C way of doing things.

Maybe with a runtime (Java!, or ada tasks) this is abstracted away, but its still there..

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#35

Post by jobu »

acomjean wrote: post #33

The problem with low level languages is they don't live in isolation. As someone who worked on a large project in Ada, you'll need to at some point use the OS and its libraries which for Unix is in C. Want to network or get a OS semaphore? C. Many languages support this call to the C library functionality, but it always seems to force a lot of things back into the C way of doing things. Maybe with a runtime (Java!, o…

Alexandrescu talked about D at Boostcon a few years back, and as I recall he was planning to make it compatible with C system libraries.

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#36

Post by brimstedt »

YZF wrote: post #26
rossjudson wrote: post #16

The phrase "C++ is an extremely fast language -- meaning software built with it runs at high speed" needs to be changed to "It's possible to build high speed software with C++". I take any performance claims made by a particular language with a pretty big grain of salt (particularly those made vs Java/JVM) unless they're accompanied by some reasonably sophisticated benchmarks and source that actually show a performan…

Here's one: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H... And yes, languages are not slow or fast. The JVM could be as fast or even faster than native (AOT) because JIT can in theory optimize better than AOT. There are fixes planned for performance issues. Things have improved since the benchmark. It's only one particular benchmark. One specific implementation of VM/compilers/etc. Let me show you so…

Is there any language/environment that tries to combine the two? I.e JIT for a few iterations and then "settling" on the best optimization and caching it?

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#37

Post by srean »

tdees40 wrote: post #31
srean wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! momentum is the most technically relevant quality of merit. Lets have a wholesome and fulfilling discussion of that aspect in particular. If that fails, lets discuss semicolons, and braces and make this HN story very meaningful and informative. After all that is the kind of discussion I come here for. If an article is crappy lets make the discussion around it crappier still. Shudder at the thought that a discu…

I'll bite: a relevant technical question would be: is D really that much better than C++11 that you should abandon C++ (with all of the consequences that would have on tooling/libraries/etc.)? I think D made more sense pre-C++11.

That is an excellent question. There is really a lot of cross-bleed between C++11 and D. In fact if not for anything else D was good competition to wake the C++ giant up into doing something about its deficiencies and backport as many D features as possible. I think this will continue to happen and and I think both the languages will benefit technically from this dynamics.

As for, should one abandon and existing C++ project and rewrite in D. Probably a bad idea, such a thing would require strong arguments. On the other hand for some project that is beginning now, I would say its evenly matched. The possibility of abandoning a lot of the C++ cruft and legacy is not something that should be ignored. Whether that compensates for the reduced maturity of tooling as compared to C++ has to be decided on a case by case basis, and this question is going to be a perennial question that would afflict the adoption of any new language. Its hard to have authoritative answers for this. That said I am looking forward to some improvements in D, better garbage collection, better separation of functions in the std library that uses garbage collection, getting the runtime memory requirements down for compiling D code that uses a lot of CTFE, and well if you could add sum types and pattern matching and efficient fibres/coroutines that would be very nice. I think fibres would be a tough one if one has to maintain portability and compatibility with C libraries.

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#38

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jarrett wrote: post #32
tdees40 wrote: post #7

D? It's been around for a fairly long time, and it doesn't really have much momentum. I'm not sure why it's "the next big programming language".

Apparently it's being used at Facebook. If they actively injected life into the D ecosystem to the same extent Google does with Go, the momentum might pick up substantially. Look at how late Go arrived--it was announced in 2009--and how popular it already is. Now, that doesn't mean Go or D can necessarily become the next big thing, i.e. the C++/Java killer. But even if they got as far as Python or Ruby, that would be…

If Facebook did for D what HHVM is for PHP, maybe people would use it.

They haven't.

Re: The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of

#40

Post by joe_the_user »

tdees40 wrote: post #7

D? It's been around for a fairly long time, and it doesn't really have much momentum. I'm not sure why it's "the next big programming language".

Well,

AS C++ competitor, it seems logical that D would require more time to mature than a scripting language and even now-successful languages like Python have taken a long period before they gained traction and then popularity.

And Facebook is using it, that seems to imply some reasonable momentum.

Post reply on HN