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A comment on Minimalism in programming language design.

Re:Minimalism in programming language design by dmitriid on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @03:56AM (#31489241)
Relevant. Guy Steele, Growing a Language https://youtu.be/lw6TaiXzHAE
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Re:Minimalism in programming language design by lifthrasiir on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @06:31AM (#31490232)
The text version: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

I feel though that the article hasn't aged well. The talk was given in the age where Java didn't yet have generic types (he mentions this alongside with operator overloading). As to how Java successfully grew since then, I'm not very sure. Not all faults of Java are his, but like many others, he only seems to have a (very good) idea about the general direction, not the path itself.

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Re:Minimalism in programming language design by ackfoobar on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @06:43AM (#31490319)
> the article hasn't aged well

He mentioned generics* is needed to "grow the language". Then Java added it, making the language more expressive. This talk aged like fine wine if you ask me.

* and operator overloading, and value types. The former I'm happy using in Kotlin. The latter we will have to wait. But for code that is not performance-sensitive, data classes/records work just fine.

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