const sucks

[Bruno Medeiros]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Just got this from Eric Niebler:
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/4apat7
> 
> Guess what Anders Heljsberg and Guy Steele have to say about future of 
> programming languages.
> 
> Immutable and eliminating side effects are necessary. Quickly written 
> down from Anders: "...we need support for immutable data at the language 
> level..." "...so that the compiler can infer that there is isolation..." 
> "... formalization of immutability... we don't have them in the language 
> and it's nontrivial to put them in... and that's the big challenge." He 
> goes on and describes the difficulties... and mentions "pure functions" 
> and "transitivity" and "functional extensions"!!! "Pure FP is not the 
> solution... what we try to do is to have islands of purity in functional 
> style and switch between default to functional in a hybrid style of 
> programming... the answer is not at the extreme..."
> 
> This is huge. You have to listen to it to hear just how huge it is. He 
> is essentially describing some of the difficulties we have encountered 
> and already solved in D2, so it looks we have a strategic advantage.
> 
> This is the confirmation I hoped was going to come someday. If it 
> surprises me, it that it comes so early, so unequivocally, and so 
> aligned terminologically. I'm in Nirvana.
> 
> 
> Andrei
> 
> P.S. Guy Steele mentions Unicode operators favorably too. Nyuk-nyuk.

Hum, nice talk overall. I also point as interesting the part about 
language adoption, where the ecosystem and killer app where mentioned as 
important factors (although Guy's definition of killer app was a bit 
different than what I expected).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D