...
If the scheme community finally wants to win, it is going to have to
accept the fact that inventing the perfect language is uninteresting
if it has no users, and that it might be better to help your neighbor
improve performance by a factor of two than to produce a fiftieth
scheme interpreter to be placed on the scheme repository FTP site and
forgotten.
Perry
Well said, and I agree fully. Tcl and Perl stole the show.
Phil Wadler, one of the Haskell designers, gave a talk recently about
how to make a language go big time. The very first thing on the list
was ``a really good foreign function interface.'' Another big thing
on the list was ``a single, or at most two, implementations which
everyone worked on.'' I may not have quoted Wadler exactly correctly,
but the point was obviously, languages go big time because a lot of
people work on/with them, and that doesn't happen if there is a) no
standard implementation and b) no way to hook in the code they've
spent their lives working on.
Cliff
--
Clifford Beshers Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab
beshers_at_cs.columbia.edu Department of Computer Science
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~beshers Columbia University
Received on Mon Oct 05 1998 - 21:52:16 CEST