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Re: Why I don't use Dylan

"Bruce Hoult" <bruce@hoult.org> wrote in message
bruce-F44D2F.13163411072000@news.akl.ihug.co.nz">news:bruce-F44D2F.13163411072000@news.akl.ihug.co.nz...
> Hard to avoid, I think.  It takes a large investment of time to learn a
> new programming language

  Well I don't know about that. I'd say that a change in language is smaller
in effort to learn than a change in API.  I picked up Obj-C in a couple of
days.  Sure it's different when you have some monstrosity like C++ or Ada,
but with a well designed language and libs, I'm not at all convinced that
this is a big issue.

  The real problem, IMHO, is that everyone is burned out by C++.  Now all
OOPS programming will forever be tainted by the effort put into learning C++
over the last 5 years or so.  But in the 80's it was "fun" to pick up new
languages.

> produced your programming language is dead and that a new OS version is
> incompatable with what you're using, or that show-stopping bug will
> *never* be fixed.

  Sure, which is why I think open source is a requirement for all
development efforts of both OS's and the dev systems that serve them.  Why
oh WHY can't AT&T drop the pickle on Plan 9 after all these years?!

> It's amazing how long THINK Pascal kept on keeping on years and years
> after it was no longer developed, sold or supported, but something in
> about MacOS 8.1 or so finally killed it and it's dead, dead, dead today,
> even thought it's *still* probably the best ever Pascal or C learning
> environment.

  Yeah, Lightspeed was cool too.

> Where would we be now if Apple has included the source code on the Dylan
> Technology Release CD?

  Hmmm, interesting question.  My only concern here is that, again IMHO, I
see a lot of herdism in the MacOS community.  While everyone makes fun of
Apple's NIH, their developers were just as bad if not worse (myself
included, but I lost my religion in 98 and I'm better off for it).  Consider
the outright shunning of things like MagicCap and WebTV, both in-Apple
ideas.  Wild.  Well, there's been a lot of culling there anyway.

  I think Cocoa serves the Apple world very well, although I think it would
be even better with a Win version.  However I do have problems with the
Obj-C language that I would like to see addressed.   So OK, what would it
take to make Dylan compile onto a Obj-C like runtime?  Is this a
possibility?  If so, we all need to talk!

Maury
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