D vs Go on reddit

Paulo Pinto pjmlp at progtools.org
Thu Feb 3 03:44:44 PST 2011


I had the oportunity to watch a presentation from Nikolaus Wirth, back in
2003, when I was at CERN.

One of the reasons that prevented Oberon to get better audience was the 
tunnel
vision of its ETHZ creators.

I remember that they were talking about it as it is the best language in the 
world, and
everyone else is a sad fool not to understand it, but will eventually 
discover the real language.

Having said this, I find the language quite nice and it is a good live 
example how to create a simple
systems programming language with GC, which allows the creation of a real 
operating system.

Funny enough, the way Go binds methods to interfaces is similar to Component 
Pascal, an Oberon's
sucessor.

--
Paulo



"spir" <denis.spir at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1205.1296696481.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On 02/03/2011 12:31 AM, bearophile wrote:
>> Walter:
>>
>>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fdqdn/google_go_just_got_major_win32_treats_now/c1f62a0
>>
>> I have one comment about one thing said by bnolsen:
>>
>>> Simplicity + Orthogonality == win.<
>
> I would like people who state such phrases to all spend 3 months (only) 
> programming exclusively in Oberon. From some point of view, it may 
> probably be considered the best language ever. Twice as expressive as 
> Modula with half of its features. It brings one the full power of 
> imperative, structured, object-oriented paradigms in a language 
> /completely/ described in 13 (!) pages of plain text.
> It is a wonderful incarnation of the core any modern language should 
> possess, and how to do it properly. Language designers of the mainstream 
> paradigm could just start with Oberon as a clean, pure, safe, pedestal and 
> just build on it.
> For a full set of reasons, probably, Oberon has not had any success. Among 
> them (?) the obsession of those guys at ETH Zürich at /not/ considering 
> practicality as beeing of any worth, I guess ;-) This transforms 
> programming in Oberon --a potentially enthusiasmic experience at first 
> sight-- into a battle of every instant against irritating corners, 
> annoying lacks, and against oneself to not explode one's screen out of 
> frustration.
>
>> What I want most is the language features to be implemented in a clean 
>> way, with a clear semantics, with very few bad interactions with other 
>> language features and very few pitfalls, and with a good clean syntax. If 
>> this is done well enough, then I am able to learn and use hundreds of 
>> features too (and lots of keywords).
>
> Oberon is all what you ask for in the first sentence. On the other hand, 
> just /listing/ features D provides and Oberon does not would require 
> pages. Actually, its feature set is radically minuscule (and even more 
> when compared to its expressive power, I guess); this does not ensure 
> cleanness, consistency and orthogonality, indeed; but it may be impossible 
> to achieve those qualities as soon as features grow in number and, 
> primarily, in diversity. I guess, in fact, it is extremely difficult even 
> for super simple toy languages. Successes (from this point of view) like 
> Oberon are rarissim as far as I know. (*)
>
> Denis
>
> (*) Even Pascal & Modula did not reach this point; precisely, Oberon 
> abandoned some of their features like enums and subrange types.
> -- 
> _________________
> vita es estrany
> spir.wikidot.com
> 




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