Post a message

Tim Sweeney’s talk The Next Mainstream Programming Language (PowerPoint PPT) is in many ways an antidote to the recent Ruby hype. Tim calls for the use of stronger types to ensure program reliability. He praises the academically-developed Haskell functional programming language. He raises concurrency as a feature which must be tackled in the next big programming language, using a better model than the shared state with threads and mutual exclusion devices used by Java - and by Ruby - (...)

"It is often forgotten that Java also made automatic garbage collection mainstream..."

I think VB actually beat it to the punch. Other langs did it before, and you could argue that other MS BASICs were mainstream, but it would be hard to say that VB wasn’t (or isn’t).

As far as the rest of the article, and the comments I’ve skimmed...the author says right up front that he’s an academic, and this is his opinion. Not everybody will find every language intuitive, so I don’t see the problem with him saying that he doesn’t find Ruby elegant or intuitive.

We can throw stones between trenches and ivory towers, but in all reality, we need both. If it weren’t for the academics, our "pragmatic" tools and languages would probably not exist; and if they did, they would perform terribly, be unstable, and leak memory like sieves. Conversely, how much money is being made, and how much work—outside the field of computer science—is being done with academic languages? Not much. Some of it vital, but still not much, comparatively speaking.

Where do I fall? Somewhere in between. What do I use? It doesn’t really matter.

It’s great if we can enjoy ourselves doing this work, but that’s not nearly as important as producing software that reliably does *what* is needed, *when* it’s needed.