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Comment by Fischgericht | Hacker News Reader

Well, Apple is the gold standard in creating new proprietary programming languages for often just evil reasons - typically for vendor lock-in.

They invented the Objective C and Swift, and made it pretty much impossible to use any standard language to target their platforms in a cross-platform way. I can access the Windows API with any language I want. I can access the Linux Kernel API with any language I want. I can access the BSD API with any language I want. I even can use any language I want on the C64 to call native operating system functions.

So, yes, I am taking the liberty to believe I know better than Apple. TBH I don't regard this conclusion as rocket science, so no ego involved here.

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There's no "walled garden" here. We want Pkl to be useful for many developers, for a variety of purposes. Hopefully that's clear enough with Java, Kotlin, and Go being amongst the various supported language bindings. We also already support Linux, and plan on supporting Windows.

It's also open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, which grants you the right to distribute and modify it.

Cheers

I appreciate you having good intentions. I don't mean to be disrespectful.

This however does not change my position that we have more than enough scripting languages focused on string operations, and don't need another language. And especially not a bloated one that itself depends on huge frameworks. If the same task can be solved using a 76KB standard Unix tool, creating a custom language with a huge bloated runtime simply can not be justified. It's bringing a sledgehammer for a task where a swiss pocket knife would be appropriate.

And my position also stands that it would make far more sense to finally agree on a config file standard format, with native parsers existing in every major programming language, so people stop re-inventing the wheel again and again and again, with the wheel becoming heavier and bulkier and less round every time.

> And my position also stands that it would make far more sense to finally agree on a config file standard format

It would also make far more sense for humans to agree on most things and work towards a common goal that benefitted us all, but that’s just as much of a pipe dream.

Proposing something that will never happen is not a practical solution.

https://xkcd.com/927/

communism immediately comes to mind. beautiful idea, but also the idea with the largest body count in the human history.

> They invented the Objective C and Swift

Apple had nothing to do with the invention of Objective-C. It had been out for 12 years when Apple first started using it.

Apple did not invented Objective-C. They took it over from NeXT. Which also didn't invent it.

Also, since Objective-C is basically just C, you could actually target their platform with plain C if you know what you're doing. Some of the underlying frameworks (e.g. Core Foundation) are actually C APIs.

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