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

21–30 of 75 posts

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

#21

Post by nitid_name »

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 imagine a language needs a certain rate of adoption to maintain the amount of programmers actively coding in that language. I feel like the term "momentum" accurately encompasses this idea.

>Lets talk about Justin Bieber!

I don't understand why you invoked the name of a Canadian popstar. There is no chance of such a comment adding to the discussion.

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

#24

Post by cwyers »

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…

Momentum means that things like tooling, libraries, documentation and frameworks are being built. Even if D is 'technically' better (whatever that means) than Go or Rust or whatever other language you want to compare it to, a language doesn't exist on its own, but inside a larger ecosystem. And the number of people using/contributing to/being employed to work on Go/Rust/Java/C#/Python/Ruby/etc. means that the D language's benefits over those other languages may not be enough to overcome the ecosystem advantages that come from "momentum."

But yes, instead of acknowledging that there's a valid point there, let's just accuse everyone who lives in the real world where you actually have to USE a language, not just admire its technical merits, of being low and middle brow.

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

#26

Post by YZF »

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 some badly written code in language X that runs slower than language Y on machine Z.

In my opinion JIT is always going to be slower than native (AOT). Maybe the gap will close but fundamentally you can do anything a JIT does AOT at zero run-time cost but not the other way around. That's not a language thing, C++ targetted at a JIT environment (and I think you can target .NET for example) will also run slower and languages that are JITted today could possibly be AOT.

The other thing is that if a specific language doesn't allow fine control over memory layouts and data types at the native level and/or if there are inherent costs in the language's design (e.g. duck typing) that is also something that will ultimately prevent it from running as fast as languages that do. That's because you can always build higher abstractions from primitive ones but you can rarely build a primitive one from a higher one. Very smart compilers may be able to identify a "primitive use case" and optimize for that but in general that's a much harder problem.

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

#27

Post by freyrs3 »

nitid_name wrote: post #21
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 imagine a language needs a certain rate of adoption to maintain the amount of programmers actively coding in that language. I feel like the term "momentum" accurately encompasses this idea. >Lets talk about Justin Bieber! I don't understand why you invoked the name of a Canadian popstar. There is no chance of such a comment adding to the discussion.

There is a strong argument to be made that software profession does have some resemblance to pop music culture. "[Pop culture] it has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present." Alan Kay 'made this rather salient observation a while back and the more I think about it the more truth I find in it.

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

#29

Post by srean »

nawitus wrote: post #20

I think most programmers I know have heard of D. When I took at look at it years ago, I concluded that the main problem was that it tried to please everyone. There's simply 'too many' features without a core theme to drive programming.

In a fun and meta sort of way you are saying D has not tried to please you. There are structural problems with this kind of criticism btw I have upvoted your comment, I do share the vision of a small elegant language yet sufficiently powerful language. At the same time I if some parts of D were to be thrown out I would find a way to complain about it. In fact one of my gripes is that it does not have compile time sum types and pattern matching, that and lightweight and efficient fibres (I believe these abstractions still use OS's threading mechanism underneath, I would be very pleased to be proven wrong).

The thing is D initially wanted to be C++ done right and then C++ done better. So with that in mind it has to have a lot of features. I do appreciate a lot that D feels a lot more homogeneous and designed rather than built up with unrelenting accretion the like C++. An aspect that I quite like is that if it is not immediately clear what should be the right way to resolve a design problem (for example name clash between function overloading and specialization) the D tendency is to make it into an error till the right solution/semantics emerges. In C++ sometimes the choice is somewhat arbitrary: here we have k choices lets pick one and go with it even if it has nothing obviously convincing going for it.

I would like to draw your eye towards templates and template metaprogramming. It really feels bolted on C++, and its really tortuous to use. In D however, although it was added much later it gels very nicely with the rest of the languages. Template metaprogramming is nothing special in D. Its just a function like any other except that it and its arguments are evaluated at compile time. (for D developers reading this, please can we have reference counting for CTFE).

So yes you are correct, it has a lot of features, given D's design scope that is hard to avoid, but these features do fit well enough with each other for a practical language to be used in anger, and fit a lot better than its immediate rival C++ / Java.

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

#30

Post by jarrett »

astrodust wrote: post #23
gerbal wrote: post #5

But can it compile to Javascript?

What can't?

True--in principle any language can be executed in the JS runtime. A lot of them can even be executed reasonably quickly. Though I suppose the parent comment was asking whether a mature compiler from D to JS currently exists.
Post reply on HN