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Comment by aeneasmackenzie | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder what could have been if cyclone got more adoption. I don't really think "rewrite it in cyclone" would be any more successful than "rewrite it in rust" but "incrementally port it to cyclone" could have been faster.

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I'm not confident Cyclone was ever intended to see widespread adoption. Most languages like it from academia are built to solve a particular problem, but then written about to help other people learn about the developed solutions to that problem. Most people in academia don't want to take stewardship of a language that will grow a serious community, but they do generally want to help in shaping those languages for the better.

Agreed, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with academic research languages, especially when people working on more directly applied projects know to use what's been researched, as the other thread about Rust alludes to. I'm reminded of Barbara Liskov's CLU language in the 70's; I don't think it got widely used, but to quote Hillel Wayne [1], "Every language spec for the next decade would namedrop CLU."

[1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/

Cyclone academia was the same that produced UNIX.

I'm not sure I follow you. What do you mean by that?

> Cyclone development was started as a joint project of AT&T Labs Research and Greg Morrisett's group at Cornell in 2001. Version 1.0 was released on May 8, 2006

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_(programming_language)

The UNIX's "AT&T Labs Research".

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