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I tries to answer the question "Why do we design new programming languages?" but it forgets the simplest of answers: Because we can. Because a compiler is nothing more than a fancy text translator.
Really fancy one, when it gets to what translation actually means in implementation effort.
I tries to answer the question "Why do we design new programming languages?" but it forgets the simplest of answers: Because we can. Because a compiler is nothing more than a fancy text translator.
Because what we know about programming has progressed, and new languages appear to take advantage of that.
Outside affine types, all the praise for Rust's type system traces back to Standard ML from 1976.
The heretic of doing systems programming in GC enabled programming languages (GC in the CS sense, including RC), goes back to research at Xerox PARC, DEC and ETHZ, late 1970's, early 1980's.
Other things that we know, like dependent types, effects, formal proofs, capabilities, linear and affine type systems, are equally a few decades old from 1980's, early 1990's.
Unfortunely while we have progressed, it seems easier to sell stuff like ChatGPT than better ways to approach software development.
That just is not true at all. These are all legitimate engineering tradeoffs, which any serious project has to balance. Calling this "aesthetics" is completely dishonest. These aren't arbitrary categories, these are meaningful distinctions engineers use when evaluating tools to write software. I think the students better understand what programming languages are than the teacher.
If you accept that a programming language is a tool and not just an academic game of terms, then all these questions have clear answers.
I tries to answer the question "Why do we design new programming languages?" but it forgets the simplest of answers: Because we can. Because a compiler is nothing more than a fancy text translator.
Really fancy one, when it gets to what translation actually means in implementation effort.
I tries to answer the question "Why do we design new programming languages?" but it forgets the simplest of answers: Because we can. Because a compiler is nothing more than a fancy text translator.
Because what we know about programming has progressed, and new languages appear to take advantage of that.
I think that one of the things that they neglect to mention, on why we invent new languages, and it's probably the most important thing - people want new ways to express concepts. It's super important because those concepts get measured, and absorbed into existing languages (as best they can), but that wouldn't have happened without the new languages New concepts like Rust's "ownership model", Smalltalk's "Object Ori…
Rust's "ownership model", is a simplification of Cyclone, AT&T's research on a better C, based on mix of affine and linear type systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_(programming_language)
Haskell's "Lazy evaluation" was present in Miranda, before all related researchers came up with Haskell as common playground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_(programming_language)
"History of Haskell"
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Java's "Green threads" go back to systems like Concurrent Pascal.
This reminds me of recreational math & gamedev, you simply do whatever you feel is fun and design it exactly as you'd like it to be.
I think it is more interesting to see which languages are still used today and how popular these are. Because this is also tied to the human user/developer.
For instance, I used BASIC when I was young - not as a professional but as a hobbyist. I liked it too. I wouldn't use BASIC today because it would be entirely useless and inefficient.