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Re: C# is not Dylan (was: Re: C# : The new language from M$)
On Fri, Jun 30, 2000, Jon S Anthony <jsa@synquiry.com> wrote:
>The oddest thing about this is that "you" ended up "depriving" _both_.
>A C/C++ hack is _never_ going to go with "pascal-ish" syntax. Never.
>And the Lisp folks won't go for it because, frankly, it is
>fundamentally broken with respect to macros.
>
>> made that a much more difficult thing to do. With Sun marketing cranking
>> out lies, backed by millions of $, faster than they can be debunked,
>
>True. But they also understood if you are going after popularity you
>need to cozy up to the same broken, butt/bug-ugly syntax that caters
>to the infantilism of the C crowd.
Sadly, I have to agree with everything you say.
Dylan will only ever appeal to a small portion of all developers, period.
But not all those of us working with C/C++ are immune to better ideas. So
there ARE some who will look at Dylan, along with Eiffel, Clean, CLOS,
Smalltalk and so on; and even some who will choose Dylan ;-)
The challenge is not to displave Java. (Who would want to have the idiots
of the world join us?) The challenge is to grow a community large enough
for Dylan to prosper.
As for your last comment about the "infantilism" of many developers, I've
long been saying the following:
Like everything else, the talent, education, and dedication of developers
is distributed with a big hump in the middle where the average is. If you
set out to design a language to appeal to the largest number of
developers, you would aim squarely for the average schlepps, and you'd
design Visual BASIC. If you want to actually advance the state of the
art, you have to figure out how to make a go of it when your market is
automatically restricted to the thin slice at the far right edge ;-)
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe@killerbytes.com
http://www.scott.net/~sribe
(303) 665-7007 voice
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