Re: Rather, DSSLs increase modularity, productivity

[Miles Egan <address@hidden>]

On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 19:43, Michael Vanier wrote:
> Java, whatever else one might say about it, has removed item (2) from
> consideration for most programmers.  Item (1) is still a factor, and I must
> say I prefer a more interactive programming environment than java usually
> provides.  But that has little to do with type systems, I think.

I think it's interesting that almost all of the radical changes made to
Java since its inception (reflection, generics, byte-code manipulation,
anonymous classes, third party scripting systems) seem to have been made
in an effort to loosen the type system or circumvent it entirely.  Java
programmers don't seem ready to abandon the type system completely, but
some things seem to be next to impossible to do without deeper
metaprogramming than the core language allows.

One of my biggest reservations about the newest crop of Handley-Milner
fpls is that they make useful metaprogramming almost impossible.  It
doesn't seem to me that this is necessarily a consequence of a strong
static type system but I could be wrong.  I'd really like to see a
language with the introspection abilities of Python or Ruby but also the
ability to lock down types at least as narrowly as Java.

miles