Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

In "The Hundred-Year Language"[0], PG elaborates on what it is to be a successful programming language, and what he thinks will happen to Java. PG predicts that Java will be an evolutionary dead-end without much influence on future languages, like COBOL[1].

Let's look at what Java has influenced. C# is fairly obvious, but that too is likely a dead-end. I don't (personally) know any good hackers who are excited about C#. Actionscript and PHP seem to have been inspired by Java in their object systems. I don't think either has or will influence future systems, except perhaps as examples of how not to do it. Scala and Clojure show some Java influence, but it's not very strong. That influence is primarily in the form of compromises required for running on the JVM platform, which probably won't be around in its current form in a few decades.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

[1] COBOL influenced the syntax of SQL, but I can't think of much else a hacker today would use voluntarily that was influenced by COBOL.

I don't personally know anyone living off of food stamps, but that doesn't mean they're not out there. C# doesn't thrive in exciting spaces, but C# is probably doing more to evangelize FP concepts than anything else in the corporate world. It's also pushing into mixed static/dynamic territory these days.

The "exciting spaces" really is one of the most important issues. Everyone who's ever told me to work in C# or Java is just in it for the money, and willing to goldrush to crappy enterprise-ware. Rather, I like Cocoa as it's the best way to interact with users who love their computers (other than Linux, 'natch.)

But yes, Microsoft is really doing some awesome conceptual stuff.

C# the language is exciting. C# the platform, however...

The only exciting thing I see about C# as a language is that it's dragging the Java programmers a third of the way to ML. What's exciting about the language itself?

Generics that aren't erased. Properties. Iterators. LINC. Lambdas.

The only feature I'm seeing in that list that didn't exist in some other language 10 years or more before it did in C# is LINQ, and I'm only willing to give that one half a point; it's essentially syntactic sugar for the standard functional sequence operations.

Sometimes I find language features "exciting" although they're not brand-new.

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