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1401 points alankay | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
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kartD ◴[] No.11939956[source]
Hi Alan, What do think about the current state of language design (Swift, Rust, Go)? Anything that makes you happy/annoys you?
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alankay1 ◴[] No.11940531[source]
I think all languages today annoy me -- just put me down as a grump. They seem to be at a very weak level of discourse for the 21st century. (But a few are fun when looked at from the perspectives of the past e.g. Erlang ...)
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1. kartD ◴[] No.11940559[source]
I see, is there anything you see today that you like? (Coq, Idris maybe?)
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2. Ericson2314 ◴[] No.11941537[source]
While the methods are different from what Alan has espoused in the past, I'd like to believe the goals are very well aligned.
replies(1): >>11945451 #
3. alankay1 ◴[] No.11945451[source]
But are "the good goals of the past" good enough goals for today and tomorrow?
replies(1): >>11952008 #
4. Ericson2314 ◴[] No.11952008{3}[source]
I would hope not. But, based on your work and other comments here, I think we'd agree that our collective sights have been set lower for no good reason. If the goals of the past cannot be fully realized, what hope can we have for those of today and tomorrow?

Concretely, I follow existing languages like Agda, Lean, Haskell, and Rust for pushing the envelope on language semantics, compiler ingenuity, and library abstractions; and http://unisonweb.org/ and http://www.lamdu.org/ for pushing the envelope on the programming workflow itself. While I don't believe editors and languages are orthogonal problems, I do believe there is enough independence to make pursuing these fronts separately in parallel worthwhile.

[Of all of those, http://unisonweb.org/ might especially fit your interests, if I understand them correctly.]

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5. ddimitrov ◴[] No.11982606{4}[source]
I tried to skim-read through the Unison About page, but all I saw was an under-designed variation of Jetbrains MPS for a single language. I assume you have spent longer with the project - do you care to summarize the differences?