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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

There will always be a need for better programming languages, with the current situation making new languages more important than ever. We have computers we can't completely utilize at the moment and they're becoming more parallelized (and thus more difficult to work with, using current tools) by the second.

Despite the progress that's been made, computing is still a very young field and there's a whole lot of room to grow. We need better languages, better compiler technology, better kernels, better paradigms for handling tasks (processes and threads don't cut it), and above all else, we need new ideas.

If people aren't experimenting with new ideas, we won't move forward. While most of the implementations (literal implementations or specific language designs) will fail, the good ideas will carry on and support the next generation. We should all welcome innovation in this space, even if we don't like what's being created.

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It seems that eventually after a particular programming paradigm (for ex. parallel, functional etc.) establishes itself, only a few programming languages will rise to the top that happen to express the ideas in that paradigm in a more clear and concise way.

For example, imagine describing a sorting algorithm to someone and you decide that it should be done in an imperative and sequential way (not functionally or without any parallelism involved). Describing it in English is too ambiguous and verbose, x86 assembly is probably too presice and too hardware specific, a turing machine program is too theoritical and too rigurous. So then you make something up, and I think eventually it looks similar to Python, Ruby or Pascal.

However, in practice the language itself is not worth much outside academia unless it comes with a solid library. At the end of the day, the user of the language will have to open network connections, render web pages, access databases and draw GUIs. If the language doesn't let them do that, no matter how elegant it is it will remain just a toy language.

The interesting things don't happen in a particular paradigm but rather where multiple paradigms meet. Python is imperative and strongly object oriented, but it also has many functional qualities to it. Ruby even more so, with great support for closures. Boo mixes imperative, object-oriented code with thorough metaprogramming, type inference, and a host of functional features. Nemerle is a functional language but mixes object orientation cleanly into the mix. These are the places where you see interesting concepts coming to light, not in the pure-X-paradigm camps.

As for libraries, this is becoming less and less of an issue. With .NET and the JVM, you have a single set of libraries that works with any compatible language and allows language designers to focus on what they're good at: the language. The effects of that can't be understated; it's allowing for a huge amount of innovation with fairly little time investment and ease of adoption.

> As for libraries, this is becoming less and less of an issue. With .NET and the JVM, you have a single set of libraries that works with any compatible language and allows language designers to focus on what they're good at: the language.

Yes, the language does't have to come with its own libraries. It can piggy-back on some other libraries. If there was just one operating system. with a good and stable API the language might not need any libraries, just the ability to make system calls. So for .NET and java, Sun and Microsoft already did the hard work as far as library code is concerned so any language on those platforms is already miles ahead of a new lanuage without any "batteries".

Interestingly enough, if an API is stable and well designed, a language could be created to take a better advantage of it. I am currently looking at Vala, it basically started as a better language than C that would take advantage of glib.

However, in practice the language itself is not worth much outside academia unless it comes with a solid library

So you have to become popular enough to get a large enough community to broadly implement lots of libraries. This means the language can't be too innovative. It has to be Blub++. A lot of the old baggage of the older languages will be carried forward due to cultural expectations.

Isn't this just how human beings work, though? Isn't this exactly what we should expect given how people work?

Yes, we should continue producing programming languages, but the danger with a programming language from Google is that they have such a reputation that other programming languages that might be superior could be overlooked in favor of the trendy option.

I'm going to take the optimistic view here. Sure, Google has muscle. But so did IBM, and where is PL/I today?

There is a PL/I plug in for eclipse and there are people working on a compiler, I wouldn't count it out just yet.

That happens fairly often in general, but it's really not that big a deal. People misapply programming languages all the time, but it never seem to hamper innovation. Innovation tends to take place in the lesser adopted languages and eventually makes its way into the mainstream; Google putting this out won't really change anything in that respect.

Like most things in life, advertising and having a bully pulpit will promote a language beyond its merits. The Sun / Java example is a good one.

However, once programming languages reach a certain maturity, the marginal benefits of a better language will be dwarfed by the effort it would require to utilize it.

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