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Comment by wora | Hacker News Reader

Oberon language had a similar system called Juice back in 1997. It does exactly the same thing, e.g. using binary format to store a compressed abstract syntax tree as intermediate format which can be compiled efficiently and quickly. I think it even has a browser plugin much as Java applet. Life has interesting cycles. I don't have the best link to the Juice.

[1] https://github.com/berkus/Juice/blob/master/intro.htm [2] ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/cis700/public_html/papers/Franz97b.pdf

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Honestly, everything we're doing recently feels like rediscovering Oberon.

Oberon had name-based public/private methods, like Go. It had ahead-of-time compilation of bytecode, as you pointed out. It had CSP-style concurrency, again like Go. The web for the last two years feels like we're rediscovering Smalltalk and Oberon and acting like we've just invented everything anew.

I originally designed the name-based public/private methods for Go. I didn't know Oberon had the same design.

We didn't acknowledge a debt to Oberon (did Java? It owes one too, Bill Joy evaluated Oberon closely).

My pal Michael Franz at UCI studied under Wirth. Michael and a PhD student, Chris Storck, did an AST encoder years back that influenced me and that I referenced re: wasm.

Oberon's great. JS was in the right place and right time. What can I say? I've been taking all the best ideas from the best projects and trying to get them incorporated, ever since 1995.

Sorry, just to be clear, I don't see anything wrong at all with raiding the best ideas from older languages. It's actually awesome: it means those ideas get used. I'm genuinely just amused at the cycle.

That's just the memory span of society. Traits reappear whenever the context calls for them to emerge. Sometimes explicitly inspired by the past, sometimes implicitely, sometimes really reinvented.

Someone did a similar article 'go vs brand X' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943554

I get the feeling that this loop thing is slowing down. Genes have been passed vertically and horizontally enough times for everybody to be aware of them. So many languages get the same features now: closures, optional static types, generators, streams, list/map/set types, channels.

We make a pilgrim's (if not a whig's) progress over time, good point.

The next generation of programming languages should address safety and ||ism. Rust takes these on based on prior work (e.g. Cyclone) but with influence from C++ best practices, which I think is winning.

You're referring to these ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim's_Progress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

We'll see how Rust fare, especially with the recent stable release. Personally I'd like to see programming to aim at Haskell, even Idris. But let's not fantasize too much (especially in a thread about WebAssembl*).

ps: why on earth did cyclone not catch on ? I'd think people would jump on a C with less rope... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_(programming_language)...

I am referring to those things, in general terms (I'm not a protestant or a whig!).

Haskell, Idris, and I must add PureScript are great, but will not sweep all before. Especially when "systems programing".

Cyclone was (a) a research project and language; (b) too heavy on sigils. Rust started with sigils but ended in a great spot, with only & and region (lifetime) ` annotations. Usability, developer ergonomics, matter.

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