Re: questions for a language designer

--- In [email protected], "Michael St . Hippolyte" <mash@b...> 
wrote: 
> 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 
 
 Thanks for the link! I will check it out. 
  
>  
> 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.  
  
 We know, but thats they hand we were delt. Fortunatly though we have a very 
tight core group that is actually directly involved with the langauge design and  
project. This core group also tends to have a strong and unified vision of the 
language. We expect this group to grow soon, but it should never really get that 
big. 
 
> 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...). 
 
 For the times and purposes Ada is an excellent language that was designed by 
committee. Well it was actually designed by one man with a group suggesting 
problems, changes, etc. 
 
 Not that we want to emulate Ada, but it can be done. 
 
> 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. 
 
 I believe we have that already. It may need some refinement, and our vastly 
enlarged community may grant quite a bit of input but the goal will remain the 
same. As far as the committee is concerned, at the moment there are only two 
people in the language design group. We will try to include as much input and 
accept as much help from the community as we can, but we must remain true to 
the vision that got use started. 
 
>  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.   
 
 Again this makes sense. 
 
> 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.   
 
 Paradigm-neutrality is a loaded term, unfortunatly. In general we don't use it to 
mean a lack of paradigm so much as we mean not favoring any of the current high 
level paradigms. Even the current spec has a paradigm, we just hope that its 
flexable enought to emulate any paradigm the programmer wishes to create. 
 
>  
> 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 
>  
 
 Have a link? 
 


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