The language gods (or icons if you will) do this at every PDC; engage in a panel and discuss where we are and what the directions for programming languages for the future. On the panel this year we had: Gilad (Newspeak) Bracha, Douglas (Javascript) Crockford, Anders (C# Amen) Hejlsberg, Erik (LINQ, Volta and more) Meijer (as usually hosting), Wolfram Schulte, Jeremy (C++) Siek.
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| Gilad Bracha | Douglas Crockford | Anders Hejlsberg | Eric Meijer | Wolfram Schulte | Jeremy Siek |
Things like fashion among languages came up… That’s philosophical. Syntax is at it’s core a triviality and yet it is what many feel they need to discuss to death; Do we use colon or semicolon and so forth. Syntax at the same time is core to all that we do.
Isn’t it very dangerous to have amateurs pimping a language? Or should we release evolution?
Is Eval evil? In Javascript today yes according to Crockford. It may be used for good.
Meta programming one program manipulating another. Reflection is one program manipulating itself.
The answer in the question of static or dynamic languages lies somewhere in between.
Anders: Our static languages are getting to be powerful enough that you can sort of in the language itself can build little DSLs.
How can we recognize the value of using more than one language? In general you should learn lots of languages. Gilad: If you don’t your job will go to Bangalore.
Anders: Dynamic is not added to C# to throw out static typing. It is added because there are many things we interact with that are not inherently statically typed. We need a common way to interact with these things. That is super useful. Dynamic is an extra tool not “now I must rewrite everything”.
In different stages of development dynamic vs. static serve different purposes. In early stages dynamic is more useful.
Douglas: A few years ago dynamic was out of style. Now they’re in.
Gilad: Learning lost of languages is good for you.
Anders: Go pick up F# and Iron Python and learn from them and broaden your view.
Cheers,
M.
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posted @ Wednesday, October 29, 2008 8:53 PM