On Tuesday, 5 January 2016 at 16:10:21 UTC, Jason Jeffory wrote:
Any more thoughts?
I empathize with you Jason. It's kind of like biological evolution that has progressed through organisms spawning new generations and dying, and some humans' search for immortality. Being free from aging and disease would lead to a different kind of evolution happening within the same generation, through technology.
This new language would not have to die out and be replaced as progress is made, and it would have a capability of evolving without growing enormous scars like C++.
Key to a clean evolution is robust upgrade-ability of source code IMO. If the language designers add the dimension of @safe as an after-thought, an upgrade script could be run on old source-code that would tag all valid functions as @safe, (or better; tag unsafe functions as @unsafe).
I'm leaning toward live-editing AST's instead of raw text for robust, quick upgrades and quick compilation times. The tree could be stored in XML/JSON/binary, but be edited in a different view. AST editing would also fix the issue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (programmer), as the same program tree could be visualized/skinned in different ways. The same programmer could also be writing programs with different defaults (such as @safe/@unsafe) depending on context (short term shell scripts vs aviation-software). The reason similar AST projects have failed in the past AFAIK is that it's very very hard to build pleasant to use editors and viewers/diff-tools. Programmers are married to their editors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzC5H5xrr-E oh Andrei :) ).
Bikeshedding in language forums would also go down a lot if programmers could re-skin keywords, brackets, indentation etc. :)
Regarding the struggle for immortality, I think the death/life cycle still provides a way of evolution that is preferable in many ways. Having different languages provides immunization from madness that might take down the "one true language". I would love to see AST-based/structured languages succeed alongside text-based languages like D some day, and see the degree of duplicated programmer hours go down.
Cheers, Chris
