Thank you for this, there are a lot of nuggets to pick up from it. I don't know if anyone's still around to comment, but I sure would be interested in seeing some elaboration on the following claim:
"Structural typing drastically reduces the burden of assigning a name to every uninteresting intermediate form but more or less precludes taking advantage of Haskell-style typeclasses or Rust-style traits."
Rochus · 1d ago
> I do not know how to build a better programming language
There can be no perfect solution, only the best possible compromise, and this only for a limited set of use-cases. The interesting and challenging task is to find such compromises.
ThreeToZero · 1d ago
> Is it so strange that after spending fifteen years of my life trying everything I could to get away from spending all day wrangling a big ball of mud in a Java IDE, that experience sounds pretty cozy to return to?
Relatable experience in software.
Also might lead to the reactionary conservatism she hated in those "frustrating programmers", that liked their toil of assembly and muddy type systems.
BoiledCabbage · 12h ago
> Still, the history of mainstream programming languages is essentially a story of programmers vocally and emphatically rejecting what eventually proved to be some of the most incredibly successful innovations in the history of the field.
Concise summary of why programming language improvement is so difficult. It's a whole bunch of people yelling loudly while being wrong.
"Structural typing drastically reduces the burden of assigning a name to every uninteresting intermediate form but more or less precludes taking advantage of Haskell-style typeclasses or Rust-style traits."
There can be no perfect solution, only the best possible compromise, and this only for a limited set of use-cases. The interesting and challenging task is to find such compromises.
Relatable experience in software.
Also might lead to the reactionary conservatism she hated in those "frustrating programmers", that liked their toil of assembly and muddy type systems.
Concise summary of why programming language improvement is so difficult. It's a whole bunch of people yelling loudly while being wrong.