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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft has a lot of PL expertise in house, including Simon Peyton Jones. Their languages clearly benefit from expertise in PL theory. Google, on the other hand, favors pragmatism over theory and prefers to draw on software engineering experience.

Google has ALOT of PL expertise in house, so much so that a lot of them don't work on PL. There language design is actually quite competitive to Microsoft's, on the theory, design, and implementation sides. Whenever we go to conferences, you'll usually have similar numbers of current and ex-academics from MS and Google.

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Yet the best that have came up with are Go and Dart....

While Apple and Microsoft have come up with Swift, F#, F*, C#, TypeScript....

I wonder what those so called PL researchers are doing at Google.

We have a joke in the PL research community that most of them are working on...ads. But really, there is a lot of PL work that you don't see that doesn't exactly involve new languages (e.g. adding asynch to JavaScript, compiler work, building frameworks, MapReduce, etc...).

Now Apple is the mysterious company that doesn't interact with the research community.

It seems to me that Apple has had a rich history of interesting languages: Squeak, Dylan, Hypertalk, AppleScript and Swift. Those are just the ones I know of.

You forgot Mac Lisp and Object Pascal. :)

Pedantic note: it was called Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL), not to be confused with MacLisp, which predates both Apple and Common Lisp and is from MIT's Project MAC.

I confess I didn't bother to search for the real name, so I typed from heart.

As side note, here is a very interesting post about the system:

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

Apple post Steve Jobs' return has been more strategic and conservative in their PL investments. Hence why swift was kind of a surprise.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_D_Z-D2tzi14/S8TRIo4br3I/AAAAAAAACv...

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