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The Next Big Language

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

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Re: The Next Big Language

#51

Post by megaduck »

david927 wrote: post #2

Ahh... I think we all miss Big Stevey. He role was never replaced and it's a shame for our entire community. I'm glad this was posted. It was written four years ago (Feb. 2007), and his quote is, "[The NBL] is going to arrive very soon (timeline: 18-24 months ...)" He later gave away that he was thinking the NBL was to be server-side Javascript. You have to hand it to him; that was a great guess, even if the timeline…

Looking at Yegge's projects, I think NBL was just "javascript". The first big one was a rails clone on Rhino, which he talked about but never released (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QD9XQm_Jd4).

After that, he started building a system for extending emacs with JS, named "ejacs". It never got fully baked, but the effort produced the very nice js2-mode. Details here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-int...

So, I think NBL was just "Javascript". Awesome call. Despite the problems with the standards process, JS has exploded in popularity over the past three years.

Re: The Next Big Language

#52

Post by unoti »

Perhaps there won't really be a Next Big Language. One thing that's become clear to me in the last few years since 2007 is that it's a hell of a lot easier to make an awesome programming language now than it was then. LLVM, CLR, Mono, JVM (specifically how it's changed to allow for dynamics and now it's changing to allow for traits and so on): all of these things let mere mortals make potentially awesome programming languages and immediately workable for production environments. All in a tiny fraction of the time that it would have taken a few years ago. The explosion of seriously awesome languages onto the scene in the last few years is evidence.

Will there ever again be a single language that captures as much of the mindshare as any of the other big languages have in they heyday? C, C++, Java, even Visual Basic occupied a huge fraction of the developer community at their peak. Some of those may be rising still in eyeball hours per month, but definitely not rising in terms of total fraction of all programmer hours being spent.

Perhaps the future is really more about consolidation for virtual machines and compiler middleware, and proliferation of end user languages? Different strokes for different folks?

Today it's not unusual at all for a larger system to use a a mixture of Scala, Java, and Python, plus some Erlang via RabbitMQ or eJabberd or CouchDB, not to mention pulling in data sources from REST or RPC type sources. Do we see that kind of mixed bag of choices getting smaller in the future, or larger?

Maybe the future is diverging on technology choices at the end points, where applications are written, and converging under the covers, where the applications are compiled and executed.

Re: The Next Big Language

#54

Post by njharman »

oemera wrote: post #15

I'm really asking myself when ECMA Script will take over the world. Everyone is talking about that it will be the NBL. It's not that I don't like ECMA Script but there is a shit lot to do to implement all those language features into ECMA Script. All those stuff and sure much more have to be done: - performance of eval() (yes, I even don't know if this is ever possible) - tools (great-eclipse-visual-studio-like IDE)…

if you accept ecma script ~= Javascript then it has already taken over. pretty much everything connected to web except embeded and even some of those runs javascript. with crossbrowser fixer libs and to lesser extent standards it is closer than anything else to write once run anywhere. more people have access to js dev tools than any other language. js is the new entry drug for new ddevs.

Re: The Next Big Language

#55

Post by brownleej »

huhtenberg wrote: post #23

I keep thinking that the Next Big Language will be a thing of re -evolution, e.g. someone going back to C and retracing steps of C++ but in a more sensible way. Also, on a tangential note -- the garbage collection is a huge deal if an adoption of the NBL among C/++ programmers is considered. The only way is to have the garbage collection optional. Similarly to how D has it, but much much simpler. Something like addin…

That sounds like Objective-C. One of the reasons I first liked working with Objective-C (before the iPhone made it trendy) was that it seemed like a much better-executed version of what C++ was aiming to be. It has optional garbage collection now, but only on the Mac. Its type system is even close to what Steve described in this article.

Re: The Next Big Language

#56

Post by aaronbrethorst »

kotrin wrote: post #45
orangecat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it actually has a chance of achieving that, unlike Haskell/Erlang/Ocaml/whatever, because Blub developers can just use it as a better Java.

I think you would see JRuby used as an industry de facto before you would see Scala.

Why?

Re: The Next Big Language

#57

Post by whatusername »

jshen wrote: post #48
yesbabyyes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't say it will be ubiquitous in that timeframe. You'd have to be pretty crazy to think that. He means it will arrive. Which is correct. The thing is, javascript is what's available in all devices. And it's a pretty nice language.

it's also showing up in other things. I believe KDE is using it as the primary scripting language for their stuff. Apple has dipped it's toe in that water with the dashboard widgets. etc

A couple of IBM/Tivoli products (TDI and TAM ESSO) use it as the scripting language as well.

Re: The Next Big Language

#58

Post by huhtenberg »

alexgartrell wrote: post #41
huhtenberg wrote: post #23

I keep thinking that the Next Big Language will be a thing of re -evolution, e.g. someone going back to C and retracing steps of C++ but in a more sensible way. Also, on a tangential note -- the garbage collection is a huge deal if an adoption of the NBL among C/++ programmers is considered. The only way is to have the garbage collection optional. Similarly to how D has it, but much much simpler. Something like addin…

just curious, do you allow malloc_gc'ed items to reference malloc'd ones?

Sure.

malloc'ed item could be the same as malloc_gc'd, but with its reference count artificially bumped up by 1. free() would decrement the count and the item will be picked up by the GC later on. If there's a provision for an immediate disposal of unreferenced items, then we are back to the standard malloc/free behaviour in case when malloc and malloc_gc items are not mixed.

Re: The Next Big Language

#59

Post by nickik »

gtani wrote: post #35
nagnatron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scala would be a fucking awesome mainstream language.

Nobody talked about F# here but it's clearly the CLR Next Language, and reasonably f&(*ing awesome; i.e. combines the Next Languageness of clojure, jruby, and scala from the JVM world. Invitably, people will raise the same "broad and deep syntax" complaints they level against scala

Clojure much bigger then Scala and F#.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=F%23%2Cclojure%2Cscala&#38...

Re: The Next Big Language

#60

Post by 6ren »

david927 wrote: post #2

Ahh... I think we all miss Big Stevey. He role was never replaced and it's a shame for our entire community. I'm glad this was posted. It was written four years ago (Feb. 2007), and his quote is, "[The NBL] is going to arrive very soon (timeline: 18-24 months ...)" He later gave away that he was thinking the NBL was to be server-side Javascript. You have to hand it to him; that was a great guess, even if the timeline…

JS doesn't have optional static type-checking, does it?
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