questions for a language designer

For what it's worth, a couple months ago on the light languages 
mailing list someone posted a very good list of questions for a 
language designer to address:

http://www.ai.mit.edu/~gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg03171.html

It's a good list but stronger perhaps on technical issues than on
questions of style.  The discussion that followed added many other
worthwhile questions.

Unfortunately at such an early stage I believe it's a disadvantage
having so many people involved, with almost as many separate notions
of what constitutes the ideal language.  It's hard to find really 
great languages whose initial design came out of a committee (though
they all seem to end up being run by committee eventually...).
Having just spent the last year designing a language, I believe a 
clear, coherent and consistent vision of the language is absolutely 
essential, and unlikely to emerge from a large group of people.  The 
problem is that there are always many local improvements that might 
be made to the various features and components of the language, but 
most of them will be orthogonal to (or even in conflict with) the 
core vision, so that they end up cluttering up and eventually 
weakening the language rather than strengthening it.  

I also think it's a mistake to try to be paradigm-neutral.  To
paraphrase the old saying, programmers must love paradigms,
otherwise why would they have invented so many of them?  IMHO 
better than avoiding paradigms is coming up with a better paradigm, 
either by combining existing ones in a new way (which is what I 
did) or by dreaming up something new altogether.  

Nevertheless I wish you the best of luck.  Feel free to look at 
Bento (the language I designed) and borrow any good ideas you see
(inside-out constructors, for example).

Michael

-----------------------------
Michael St. Hippolyte
http://www.bentodev.org


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