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Little languages are the future of programming

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Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#111

Post by mcluck »

tester756 wrote: post #90
cies wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small languages either become big, or are replaced by things that are big, for the same reason most people prefer a car to a horse to go shopping. So why are shell languages still around? Why are they not replaced by C#, C++, Java or another big (=general purpose) language? I find your horse->car comparison more akin to the sh->bash->zsh transition. Zsh is not as small as sh, but still it is in the small league is…

>So why are shell languages still around? Are they? I don't use them more than once a year

I'd say you're in the extreme minority then. I'm not a bash hacker but I usually end up writing a little script for myself at least once a month. Even just doing `command && command` is technically using a shell language

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#112

Post by t-3 »

tester756 wrote: post #90
cies wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small languages either become big, or are replaced by things that are big, for the same reason most people prefer a car to a horse to go shopping. So why are shell languages still around? Why are they not replaced by C#, C++, Java or another big (=general purpose) language? I find your horse->car comparison more akin to the sh->bash->zsh transition. Zsh is not as small as sh, but still it is in the small league is…

>So why are shell languages still around? Are they? I don't use them more than once a year

Still alive and quite well. In fact, as more and more programs are written, they become more and more useful. We're already well into an era where programming can be nearly entirely ignored in favor of merely scripting new behavior out of the interactions between existing programs.

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#113

Post by kibwen »

geysersam wrote: post #104
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. That's why we have languages with functions now, because people didn't want to manually do a register dance in assembly. That's why we have name spaces, because naming conventions only take you so far. That's why we have map and filter (or equivalent) because that's what most loops are doing anyway. Generation after generation, we discover that we all use common abstractions. We name them design patterns, the…

I think one of the biggest counter examples to your argument is SQL. It's been around a long time. It's not general purpose. It's considered the best option there is if your setup allows you to use it.

Plenty of people prefer language-integrated things like LINQ over SQL, although we can argue whether or not LINQ represents a kind of DSL.

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#114

Post by [deleted] »

benj111 wrote: post #101
AlotOfReading wrote: post #11

People have been making this argument since the 80s and possibly even earlier. My experience is often the opposite. Little languages are usually far, far harder than (mis-)using "big" languages for small tasks. The problem is that your DSL has to be understood by other people, including future you. Programming tasks are vast, combinatorially explosive state spaces full of weird potential interactions between features…

Would you (mis)use c to do text processing, or would you use shell tools? I suppose all this leads me to the suspicion that little languages fill in for shortcomings in big languages. Big languages can absorb the things that work, this negating the need for small languages in that sphere. Although how far can that go? Can we keep making ever bigger languages? Or at some point does it crumble under its own weight?

[deleted]

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#115

Post by williamcotton »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #11

People have been making this argument since the 80s and possibly even earlier. My experience is often the opposite. Little languages are usually far, far harder than (mis-)using "big" languages for small tasks. The problem is that your DSL has to be understood by other people, including future you. Programming tasks are vast, combinatorially explosive state spaces full of weird potential interactions between features…

It seems entirely possible to create a tool for making little languages that also supports interfaces for tooling and documentation. Tooling is actually quite abysmal for general purpose languages and as the article points out the tooling for little languages can be much more powerful when there’s a smaller surface area. Also we could build languages that are primarily geared around tooling and documentation instead of languages designed around different manners of defining functions and iterating over lists.

I also don’t think that anyone has ever suggested that making a custom language is a small endeavor.

Whatever the future of programming languages it will definitively not be popular at first and negative criticisms will be the top-rated commentary. And when the new paradigm comes I can almost guarantee that the majority of the HN crowd will be too old and set in its ways to make the transition. Why would the future be any different than the past with regards to paradigms shifts?

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#116

Post by vfinn »

AI will kill the need for all these abstractions. There will be as many or as little abstractions you want. It doesn't matter. New languages of all shapes and forms will be generated eventually on the fly. You will just have to know what you want.

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#117

Post by adql »

eternalban wrote: post #109
adql wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could've probably just been Lua tho ?

modulo binding to (extant) c++ runtime, yep. But this was in spring of '95. Ruby released later in December of that year. Lua was first publicly released in '94. I learned about the existence of these two a few years later (Lua first, and then Ruby via RoR). mea culpa: there was no reddit or github or HN back in '95. Usenet would have been helpful but it wasn't on my radar in those days. I was just 2 years out of arc…

Yeah back then it was much less to choose from. TCL i guess but honestly I was never a fan.

I did wrote a firewall DSL in Perl right around that time but that was just a toy of a teenager.

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#119

Post by scotty79 »

wruza wrote: post #88
scotty79 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some modern success stories like LINQ or JSX.

JSX isn’t a separate language though. It’s recursively inline html/js.

Yeah, but it's not really HTML nor JS. It's a DSL which is a superset of JS for generating HTML that can use its own syntax in its expressions.

Re: Little languages are the future of programming

#120

Post by BiteCode_dev »

geysersam wrote: post #104
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. That's why we have languages with functions now, because people didn't want to manually do a register dance in assembly. That's why we have name spaces, because naming conventions only take you so far. That's why we have map and filter (or equivalent) because that's what most loops are doing anyway. Generation after generation, we discover that we all use common abstractions. We name them design patterns, the…

I think one of the biggest counter examples to your argument is SQL. It's been around a long time. It's not general purpose. It's considered the best option there is if your setup allows you to use it.

As to not repeat the same argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704199
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