Hacker News Reader

Too late for what? It's a programming language, not a racehorse.

Dylan offers something very different from the languages you mentioned; even Clojure, a fellow Lisp, rejects OOP while Dylan embraces it. There's definitely room for Dylan in the language landscape.

View on HN

Too late as being able to bring to the table something that enough developers would care about so their efforts don't fall quickly into oblivion. I've seen so many times projects like this trying to resurrect a "passe" technology just for nostalgia sake. Without a decent community of motivated supporters and a real solution to current issues developers are facing, I fear that Dylan will follow the same path. In the specific case of Dylan, I remember that its infix notation didn't support very well one of best LISP features, namely macros. And while studying the language in the late 90s, I also learned that David Moon, one of the original designers, moved to work on something else. I took it as a sign. Don't get me wrong, I liked Dylan over Common LISP at the time, becauee they did a great job at simplifying the mess with collections and its notation would mean greater adoption. That was obviously not enough to succeed. As for embracing OOP, so does Scala, although at the cost of some compromises. But at least with Scala, the platform is here to address real projects. Do you really have the time and energy to start rebuilding all the libraries that are required to develop anything beside a toy project?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com