One thing, just looking through the links and I'm wondering how fast we're moving away from Alan Turing's definition of a programming language towards Terry Pratchett's science magic.

posted by N2Cheval

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PS: What do you think about mirrors?

posted by Charles

C#, Cω, Spec#, Sing#, F#, Java, Scala, BitC, Newspeak, Haskell, ML, etc. -- it's a violent research storm out there, a race to find the language(s) that facilitate the most robust, scalable, efficient, secure, interoperable and lightweight libraries, right down to the driver level. It's not hard to see why Jonathan Shapiro was hired by Microsoft, although it would be interesting to know why he left so early - a difference in philosophy perhaps.

It would also be cool to have Erik grill some of these guys, some time.

Been too long since we've seen Eric

posted by exoteric

You will see more Erik and Brian (and Yuri and...). No fear.

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posted by Charles

posted by exoteric

posted by staceyw

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posted by Charles

posted by felix9

Re thoughts on mirrors? I think they are a good idea to get around the problems with reflection, but the more I read and learn, the more I'm thinking that we're trating the symptoms of our programming limitations rather than the cause.

Anyway, I'm biased as I'm not a programmer, developer, engineer, computer scientist or the like, but an assembler. I take components, patterns and practices to make software, so during the day if you want anything more, my repsponse is "I've got data, screens and 5 minutes, where/what/when/how and especially why are you going to help?"

posted by N2Cheval

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posted by Charles

Right on time for an example of (loosely described) "practical programming" is here.

http://tv.devexpress.com/#PacManCode.movie

Charles, I'm looking forward to the ELC video, just a half day out so have to look at it tonight.

posted by N2Cheval

often when i hear these kinds of discussions though i cant help feeling like what they are talking about is really an api, not a language. i mean the main innovations in newspeak seems [to me] to be the IDE it self, is that really a language? does ambient talk really need to be a language? it sounds more like a service api..

i dont mean to troll or anything, but how much has the actual languages really changed the last 10 years? it almost always seems like this or that idea came from language x or y that was invented 50 years ago.

i dont think that has to be a bad thing though, rather, doesnt it honor those people back then? they really did a good job and i dont mean to devalue anthing these people are doing, they are doing really cool things. im just asking if its really languages they're designing and not apis and ideas that are kind of language independent..

i guess what im saying is that i feel its getting less and less liekly that some completely new way of expressing programs is going to come.. that might be a boring in some ways but maybe it will enable us to focus on other things, kind of the philosophy of the problems rather than the actual words we use to express and solve them..

but hey.. i dunno nothing really

posted by aL_

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posted by Charles

Jonathan Edwards said "The biggest problem with programming is that we don’t agree on what the problem is" and i think part of that problem is that we should think more about what to say rather than what words to use. i dont belive a language it self can solve any problem, its more a means to express the solution once you figured it out. once you've figured it out, does it really matter if you use a static or dynamic language? i think it doesnt. at that point its more about personal preference

i think my point is that i think language design has in a significant part drifted into beeing api design instead, and if we embrace that i think alot more cross pollination across "religious" bounderies (static vs dynamic, interative vs functional vs declarative) could happen

posted by aL_

There's much wisdom in that remark.

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posted by Charles

posted by aL_