Re: dylan revival

[Scott Ribe <address@hidden>]

> CLR is going to be a major time and resource waster for languages that
> cannot compete with VB and C-hash in terms of FUD and lock-in. Dylan
> would do much better to side with Apache and open web services.

Exactly. For powerful & immutable reasons which would be a waste of time and
effort to fight against.

> This is an interesting idea. The main problem with implementing Dylan is
> the Macro system. I've been toying with the idea of a macro-less "Dylan
> Light" for Marlais and Mindy.
> The basic Dylan libraries are well defined. On top of this there are the
> common-dylan libraries, and on top of those goes DUIM (Dylan's interface
> manager, like Lisp's CLIM or Java's AWT). Socket libraries, ODBC, COM,
> CORBA, OpenGL, XML, etc. can be added as needed.

Just curious, would the macro implementation be substantially easier if
Dylan had stuck with S-exp syntax? Or are the problems deeper?

> This ain't gonna happen. :-) Apple dumped Dylan in the mid-1990s and are
> unlikely to re-support it. Other major companies will avoid it for this
> reason.

For the same reasons obscurely referenced in my first comment, it makes no
sense for any of these manufacturers to support Dylan. I wish I had time to
write that essay. Someday I'll have to make time. For now, here's the
thesis: in order to gain mass-market acceptance a programming language (and
its supporting tools) must squarely target developers with mediocre
abilities and average intelligence. (A secondary point is that such a
language is guaranteed to be uninteresting to me.) Examples: Visual BASIC
and Java, and now C#.


-- 
Scott Ribe
scott_ribe@killerbytes.com
http://www.killerbytes.com/
(303) 665-7007 voice