"Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead."

[JN]

On Friday, 3 May 2019 at 16:23:25 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> On Friday, 3 May 2019 at 07:45:33 UTC, JN wrote:
>> On Friday, 3 May 2019 at 02:25:47 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> So does Lisp. And one of the main criticism of Lisp is that 
>> every programmer invents their own programming language 
>> features and it's very hard to reuse code or libraries because 
>> everything is written in different style.
>>
>> [...]
>
> I'm not sure the Lisp curse would exist if a package manager 
> had been part of the ecosystem from the beginning. Take D - 
> anyone _could_ write their own parser library but basically 
> everyone uses Pegged.

Well, Lisp curse applies mostly to language features. Imagine if 
Pegged required you to pull in "pegged-oop", "pegged-traits", 
"pegged-exceptions" and then you can't use throw because it 
doesn't support it, instead you have to do 
mixin(ExceptionHandler!((e) { writeln(e.toString()) })) to handle 
exceptions. That's what could occur if a language gives too much 
freedom and doesn't standarize on language features.