Re: What is a lightweight language

["Christopher Barber" <address@hidden>]

| I think the solution here is to admit that continuations
| are hard, but give up the idea that you're trying to
| design a language for people who can't deal with hard
| stuff.  It is an amazingly liberating axiom.  You can just
| concentrate on whatever makes the language better, instead
| of getting sucked into the black hole of trying to guess
| what the  "average programmer" can deal with-- that's
| marketing, not technology.

No, that's design.  Of course, if you do it right, you don't simply guess, but
make efforts to actually measure the usability of your design for your target
audiences.

| Psychological hurdles are a real problem, like Dan says,
| but you can choose not to solve that problem.

Not if your target audience expects you to do so!

We could not adopt that approach when designing Curl because we wanted to
support a much broader audience than advanced programmers.

| (My guess is that if you do end up designing a language
| that all the best hackers like, everyone else will get
| dragged along, psychological hurdles or no.

That would be nice, but I doubt that would happen unless you could come up with
a language so wonderful that all talented programmers would adopt it and refuse
to work with anything else.

- Christopher