Your Language Features Are My Libraries

Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by gecko on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @05:05PM (#619320)

I'm not arguing things like LINQ shouldn't come with the language. I'm arguing that I should be able to add them if I want to. In Smalltalk (or Lisp, or Scheme), I can. In C#, I have to wait for Microsoft to get around to it. Look at the situation with lamdbas in Java, if you want another example.

That doesn't change the fact that I'm very glad most Smalltalks ship with ROE or GLORP, or that C# ships with LINQ. It just says that I want to be able to add features as easily as the language designer can.

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Re:Your Language Features Are My Libraries by suranap on Thursday May 21, 2009 @12:38PM (#620703)

I've expressed exactly this point to many people involved in C#. Partly, they do not appreciate that most PL features can be implemented as libraries in more powerful languages. Another part is they understand that blub programmers are interested in features, not libraries. Being popular means appealing to the masses.

If a language does not have closures nor more complex control flow features, you really can't implement PL features as equivalently easy-to-use libraries. IMHO, that's why most mainstream languages continue to add superficial features rather than fix the core problems in their PL.

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