Discussion

rramadass: Related must-read is Wirth's Turing Award Lecture From Programming Language Design to Computer Construction (pdf) - http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/wirth/TuringAward.pdf

wolvesechoes: Who are Wirths, Dijkstras, Hoares, McCarthies and Keys of today? I mean - who represents current generation of such thinkers? Genuinely asking. Most stuff I see here and in other places is about blogposts, videos and rants made by contemporary "dev influencers" and bloggers (some of them very skilled and capable of course, very often more than I am), but I would like to be in touch with something more thoughtful and challenging.

conartist6: I can't claim to be equal to the greats, but I do run a Discord server where I think and talk a lot about both the philosophy and practice of language design while building tools that I hope will change the state of the art: https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX

notarobot123: The key, then, lies not so much in minimising the number of basic features of a language, but rather in keeping the included facilities simple to understand in all their consequences of usage and free from unexpected interactions when they are combined. A form must be found for these facilities which is convenient to remember and intuitively clear to a programmer, and which acts as a natural guidance in the formulation of [their] ideas.We've successfully found some strong patterns for structuring programs that transform data in various ways for the kinds of programs Wirth was imagining. The best patterns have proven themselves by being replicated across languages (for example discriminated unions and pattern matching) and the worst have died away (things like goto and classical inheritance).There's still work to do to find better languages though. A language is good if it fits the shape of the problem and, while we've found some good patterns for some shapes of problems, there are a lot more problems without good patterns.I had hoped there'd be more languages for everyday end-user problems by now. At the start of the SaaS era it seemed like a lot of services were specific solutions that might fit into a more general modelling language. That hasn't happened yet but maybe a programming language at just the right level of abstraction could make that possible.

wolvesechoes: > and the worst have died away (things like goto and classical inheritance)What's so wrong about classical inheritance, and how it died away while being well-supported in most popular programming languages of today (Python, C++, Java, C#, TS, Swift)?

Someone: Inheritance has its uses, but is easily overused.In a sense, it’s like global variables. About every complex program [1] has a few of them, so languages have to support them, but you shouldn’t have too many of them, and people tend to say “don’t use globals”.[1] some languages such as classical Java made it technically impossible to create them, but you can effectively create one with class Foo { public static int bar; } If you’re opposed to that, you’ll end up with making that field non-static and introducing a singleton instance of “Foo”, again effectively creating a global.In some Java circles, programmers will also wrap access to that field in getters and setters, and then use annotations to generate those methods, but that doesn’t make such fields non-global.

wolvesechoes: > Inheritance has its uses, but is easily overused.This I can agree with, but it is far from being "worst pattern". Everything can be like salt.

Someone: Yes, but inheritance used to be like salt. That’s why it, like “goto” and global variables, got so much attention.

artemonster: very hot and edgy take: theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless. as someone who actively studied the field, worked on contemporary CPU archs and still doing some casual PL research - asides from VERY FEW instances from theoretical CS about graphs/algos there is little to zero impact on our practical developments in the overall field since 80s. all modern day Dijkstras produce slop research about waving dynamic context into java program by converting funds into garbage papers. more deep CS research is totally lost in some type gibberish or nonsense formalisms. IMO research and science overall is in a deep crisis and I can clearly see it from CS perspective

pjmlp: Indeed, we don't really need affine type systems, what use could we get for them in the industry. /s

artemonster: If you really have followed the research in type systems and see how it *factually* intersects with practical reality you wouldnt joke about it. Its a bizzare nonsense what they do in „research“ and sane implementations (only slightly grounded in formalisms) are actually used

rramadass: > theoretical CS is vastly overrated and useless> as someone who actively studied the field,Does not compute.Your comment is mere empty verbiage with no information.

artemonster: Your critique is valid, but I am not in a mood to prove myself to anons on the internet :)

kjs3: "I come to talk low-effort shit, not to think or inform". Par for the course, I suppose.