The Next Big Language

[retard]

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:11:59 +0000, JMRyan wrote:

> Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in
> news:i9f442$2bl$1 at digitalmars.com:
> 
>> Discusses a few languages including D:
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dsdd6/the_next_big_languag
>> e_2010_edition/
>> 
>> Andrei
> 
> Call me a curmudgeon, but I don't like Next Big Thing discussions.  The
> problem is worse in applications than in programming languages, but I
> have learned to detest all such discussions.  Software users, software
> reviewers (they're the worst) and even programmers look at Lotus 123
> with dollar signs in their eyes and assume that a world of hundreds of
> millions of computers isn't big enough for any options other than The
> One True Big Thing.
> 
> I posted a little rant about this on some newsgroup during The Great
> Browser Wars.  Complaining about the attitude that the world wasn't big
> enough for two browsers, I noted that the world was plenty big enough
> for quite a few makes and models of cars.  If the software reviewers of
> the day had worked for a car mag, they would have written about what was
> The One Best luxury/sports/enconobox/muscle/lots of cargo/lots of
> passengers/off road use/etc. car.  I got two replies.  One said "But IE
> is indeed better than Netscape" and the other asked "But what about the
> [whatever car it was] that fits into all these categories".  I had to go
> to the gym and spend some time on the heavy bag to work out my
> frustrations.
> 
> All of this strikes me as silly as wars over The One True Placement of
> Curly Braces and The One Best Text Editor.  I just want D to be popular
> enough to give a nice set of useful libraries to work with.

Peter Norvig also seems to think that the language isn't the next big 
thing -- there are so many other things to consider.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815

I've many times wondered why techies become so emotional. Editors, 
licenses, languages, operating systems, browsers, everything! force them 
to choose sides. This kind of thinking forces them to keep the train of 
thought inside a sealed box.

One thing I've been wondering is whether visual languages have any merit. 
A proper combination of an IDE, (visual) language and a compilation tool 
chain may turn out to be more productive from programmer's POV and also 
easier/more efficient to implement (e.g. no parsing!, just simple de-
serialization).

The same thing happens in browser/OS world. Ordinary users are too blind 
to see what they really need. Is it a robust cross-platform distributed 
middleware? It very well might be. The browser and OS abstractions are 
becoming more and more outdated.