Now that I’m back from vacation, I’ll answer the implicit question Adam asked in his post about less powerful languages:
Perhaps that is what Curtis is really aiming at: a powerful language that enough people can be good at.
That’s close. I don’t want a less powerful language, but I do want one without a steep learning curve, and in fact, one where you can ignore the more abstract parts unless you really need them. There’s more to it than that, though: each language makes some things easy and some things hard. I want a language where the things that our developers need to do often are easy, and the hard things are things they rarely need to do.
But, the corollary is that the things that are hard to do will rarely be done, whether needed or not. That’s true even in Natural, where features like AT BREAK are ignored and reimplemented rather than facing the complexity of understanding them.
I agree with that, but do we know which languages might provide it? Or, how do we go about finding out?
I don’t think any existing language is likely to exactly match our biases. There is a tension between the “get lots of good functionality for free” aspect that makes us want to join a community, and our tendency to want to optimize our own particular case.
As Adam says, I don’t know of any existing language that matches what I’m talking about here. I don’t think that the kind of people who are developing new languages today have much contact with the enterprise environment Natural (or for that matter, COBOL) was designed for. This leaves people like us with a choice between sticking with older languages/development environments, or switching to something that was designed with goals that don’t quite match ours.
And note that I said “people like us.” I think there is actually a large community in the same boat we are. If you’ve been following the SAG-L mailing list the past couple of weeks you know that morale is low in SAG-customer-land, and I’m suspect there are many COBOL shops wondering about their future. Could a new language build a new community from some of these folks?
Well, maybe. You’d have to figure out what they had in common, and whether that could be the basis of a good language. I don’t really think keyword-driven syntax, as in Natural, is a good basis — too hard to extend.
But I also very much doubt we’d be willing to devote the considerable capital it would take to build a sufficiently compelling language to have a chance. Gone are the days that a language can succeed without a large standard library. You could attempt to build it atop another architecture — e.g., a scripting language for .Net or the JVM — but then you run into the same problems that plague languages like Clojure: your developers need to have at least reading proficiency in Java so that they can understand the JavaDoc that describes the libraries.
Honestly, it strikes me as cheaper to change ourselves.
Only a tangent, but a funny example of some things being harder in a language: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/c2a9e8d27a1fff3f