Comment by 616c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 616c | Hacker News Reader

As an aside (and please do not take it as a flame), this is a very neat article that shows a class of languages in a paradigm I have never considered: Lispy languages (semantically) without Lisp morpho-syntax. I had heard of Julia of course, and see a few mentions here and there of Dylan. It is interesting Dylan had such little interest, or even similar projects, because everyone complains about Lisp syntax (as I see here, I am an amateur Lisper and I understand its history and appreciate it), but bemoans not having other languages with the power of homo-iconicity and other core parts from which the macro system and others gem are based upon (I forget the guy with that quote: keeping adding features to a lang, and you get a much shittier Lisp).

Why did these languages not take off (at least pre-Julia)? I have heard other people "debate" (and I use it hear to say disagreement on principle not on details of said debate that Ruby and other langs are Lisp-like, but fall short. Dylan seems to have been Lisp (proper) without Lisp syntax on purpose (after intentionally moving from the design phase). So why do languages with such powerful expressiveness (for your value of the word, I do not want to start that discussion either) never take off, Dylan or otherwise? It seems that is what all programmers, at least the ones more advanced than me, clamor for.

Aside from Apple having abandoned the language, the basic issue is that Dylan projects were very ambitiois. Dylan was aimed at C++, so Harlequin and CMU spent a huge amount of time developing sophisticated native code compilers, thread-safe GC, compilation to native executables, etc. Harlequin also did a whole IDE, with GUI toolkit and Emacs-like editor, all written in Dylan and self-hosted. Ruby, Python, etc, showed there was a market for simple dumb implementations that were nonetheless useful, and got to market quickly because it was easy to do a little C interpreter that did a dictionary lookup every other operation.

There's a renaissance in native-compiled languages now, mainly thanks to LLVM and the JVM. Having a fast optimizing compiler back end that generates binaries on many platforms is a huge head start, and goes a long way to making the language immediately useful. The JVM gives you those and then some.

> There's a renaissance in native-compiled languages now, mainly thanks to LLVM and the JVM

No, technology just goes in circles.

Like 30 years ago when people started to realize P-Code and other VM approaches were too slow and resource hungry to be useful targeting minicomputers.

Now mobiles and high electricity costs are making developers reach the same conclusions again.

> Now mobiles and high electricity costs are making developers reach the same conclusions again.

But rather than fall back on existing compiled languages, they are now trying to build something that has it all.

That is also not new. While the minicomputers struggled with VMs and got back to AOT compilation, research labs workstations already had mixed mode.

The first JIT were targeted at Lisp and Smalltalk environments, and commercial Lisps always had JIT + AOT compilation support.

As for going for something new, it is hard to bring people back to technologies that are no longer mainstream, without adding something new to it.

Dylan was a victim of bad timing if anything. Apple was in the middle of its worst period when they shelved it. And then Java came along and the third parties that were working on independent implementations got steamrolled by that. It's a shame, because despite its verbosity, Dylan is a powerful language and still one of my favorites.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule, is the one you're thinking of :)

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