Brains, bucks and programming languages

The title is supposed to be a paraphrase of "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" in a geeky context.

This autumn I went to see Paul McCartney in concert - a lifetime dream come true. For most people Paul McCartney is first of all an ex-Beatle. Indeed, during the concert he played many classic Beatles tunes to please the audience. And the audience was very pleased. Then, he cashed in the multi-million-dollar cheque and went back to England to do what he really likes - which at this point seems to be composing experimental electronic music.  To me it looks pretty fair. 

Recently I listenned  to James Gosling's keynote at the JVM Language Summit. I actually enjoyed the presentation very much. One of the things he said, was something like "My dream would be to implement Fortran over JVM ... ah, but I have a day-job".  Now, not that JVM really needs a Fortran IMO. But think about it for a second. How many people in the world can design a programming language? How many of them can design a good programming language? And a popular one? Java is more popular than Beatles. Uhm, well... even if it's not, you get the idea.  Now what can be more important for James Gosling to do during his day job than design a programming language of his choice, I should ask his employer? What? Throwing T-shirts at JavaOne attendants? No, really. Why is it that James Gosling can't do anything he freaking likes for the rest of his life?

I think something in our business is unfair. I am not saying Microsoft model is right, I am very pro open-source and free software and all that. But I'm confused - something about it isn't right. Large IT companies make loads of money, and waste a lot of it on complete crap - I've seen this from inside. So how come Gilad Bracha cannot find funding for Newspeak development? This is totally surreal!

There goes another angry post.

 

DSL - fuel for life

Do you feel that your programming language is too bloated? I do, and I know I am not alone. 

Let's take a look at Java. You may ask - what do you mean, when you say Java? Ah, good question. There is Java, the language, as described in the spec. Java the Standard. Don't you wonder where's the new edition of the book, BTW? Anyway, then there's mini-edition, enterprise edition, real-time Java... there's a huge stack of official/certified technologies (e.g. all the JEE stuff - is JSP or JSF Java? is JPQL?), for which there are often multiple vendors. That's not all, there are all the popular open-source frameworks that don't bother getting Sun's approval, and yet they possess lion-share of the market (e.g. Eclipse, Spring). There's no chance to even keep track of all this, forget mastering. And yet, I don't feel that I have all I need. I have all that, and yet I can't write a descent program the way I'd like to, because I am missing some core features. What? Let's see - how about proper modularity, closures, tuples, local type inference, properties... 

Java made the grade in expanding layer by layer - to the extent where it reminds me the state of the Earth in Wall-E. If you haven't seen the movie, I'll just say that the Earth drowned in human-produced garbage, and the garbage made it inhabitable for anything organic. The garbage in Java makes it impossible for the core, organic features of the language to grow. In the movie, people are leaving, and robots stay back to clean up - now you make the analogy. 

As a Java programmer I really identify with Wall-E. Moving tons of garbage around, day after day, in a desperate attempt to clean up the world - something obviously impossible. And man, I'd love to be that flying-iPod-looking Eve from outer space. She's so strong, so modern, so clean and shiny...  And she has a mission!

If Wall-E is my Java, then my Eve is no doubt Newspeak. 

So what does it mean in a wider sense of programming languages? I think good language should have a small core, as little redundancy as possible. And it should grow from then on. Here's Guy Steel at OOPSLA '98:

I think that the best way of growing is via internal domain specific languages, DSLs, - you don't change the core language, yet you cover more and more domains. Anders Hejlsberg also talked about it at the recent PDC conference - adding features as a DSL; and then, if the DSL is very successful and popular, add syntactic sugar to the core language, as they did with LINQ. I don't think that you need that latter part if your language is well suited for DSLs to begin with. So the language should have a small core and be well suited for DSLs. Java isn't DSL-friendly. Scala is much better, e.g. the Actors library. Haskell, Ruby and of course Smalltalk are really good at it. 

The last part is getting rid of garbage as you grow, and again, Gilad has an idea how to do that. 

I could go on forever and ever about DSLs, showing examples like parser combinators, unit-test and SQL libraries and so on. Martin Fowler is writing a book. So, instead of boring you with repeating what's been said many times, and enumerating lots of references, I will just finish with this cutest quote:

DSLs are for making languages bear-able.

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words confuse me. [Milne 1926]

The premise of this subject is that computers should adapt to the ways of people, and not the other way around.