From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-65-14.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.3 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_05,NICE_REPLY_A, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC,T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "G.B." Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Carbon Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 10:11:47 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: Reply-To: nonlegitur@notmyhomepage.de MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 08:11:47 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: reader01.eternal-september.org; posting-host="fd339adfeee586ac60124d4699f8e3c5"; logging-data="4003379"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19yD/l4IrYg6DzdUPGHT4BpxzCvQR9JcgE=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.11.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:UJJTOPmB9JG0pRI5ZR1UPw79YLI= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:64167 List-Id: On 29.07.22 13:03, John McCabe wrote: > Looking at some of the languages that have come out in recent years, it's > obvious that people can't be bothered to type much; "fn"/"def" (or, even, > nothing!) instead of "function"/"procedure", "{"/"}" instead of > "begin"/"end", "&&" instead of "and", "||" instead of "or" (!!!) etc. Continued emphasis of syntax differences and then not paying proper respect to what is empirically attractive to so many prospects will miss an important point. Not about flies. About customers. Without customers, there will be no products. Such as, > From what I can see, some of the "moderators" on that Carbon group don't > have much real (...) What moderators seem to have, though, is quite real. It is a task, they are heading a group and they need to process input from an Adaist in this many faceted situation, and consider the implications. Also the implications of their response. > I suspect > they really have no clue about what they could achieve with Ada, Why would Alphabet Inc. want to achieve an entirely different goal, viz. use Ada? Maybe reuse Ada. Given the many years and the many $ it has taken to produce Ada and Ada products, this fact surely has meant business at some point. Why would anyone not learn from that past opportunity and start a language from scratch? To become an asset in this productive process, by way of expressing a positive attitude and offering economically useful contributions might be a way of influencing the programming language. > However, from the point of view of creating a new language, the fact that > so many people clearly think it _has_ to be the C/C++ way is quite > disturbing, especially since, as I think I mentioned, it's going to be a > number of years until any new language really makes its mark, so new > languages should be taking future developers into account, not just > pandering to the laziness of existing ones! If your job is to help create return on investment, such as investment into a programming language, then how is it economical to not pander to the expectations of potential customers? Customers who might otherwise want to use Rust, say? (Does someone know a way of making entrepreneurs not just aware of how each of them is milked by software industry giants, but also a way out for each of them individually?) Scala, by way of illustration, now has almost all language features that Oracle Inc. will be adding to Java in the coming years, as I'm sure they know. Scala isn't associated with the same marketing skills, though. Scala might also be using syntax that is considered boring and dated, using many keywords, but I'm not entirely sure, in particular after they changed it for version 3...