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Comment by yycom | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that pypy is the obvious candidate for blessing as the new reference implementation (because it is self-hosted), but I never see any mention of this being so, with most next-gen effort still being spent on 3.x and CPython. Why is this so?

2 reasons IMO:

1) We don't have Python3 support yet, we're working towards it, but we're behind some. Have the reference implementation be a regression over the previous one doesn't make much sense.

2) We don't have enough users.

And honorable mention reason: RPython is an... interesting language to program, something like a cross between C, Python, Java, with error messages from MUMPS.

> error messages from MUMPS

Is fixing that tractable? Cryptic error messages is one of the most frustrating turn-offs to new would-be contributors.

/probably one of the few people here who has written MUMPS code

heh, epic alum?

I'm currently at epic, but I know there are other companies still using the language.

Of all the things that I dislike about MUMPS, error messages aren't anywhere near the top of the list.

Yes, it probably is. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation though, everyone who knows RPython well enough to make the changes can already understand the errors just fine.

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