John Ousterhout <ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com> wrote in article
<5i7euq$cmg@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM>...
> Wow, there's been quite a party going on over here on comp.lang.scheme!
There is always a party here. But I think the major reason your paper
struck a nerve
has nothing to do with "languages being left out" per se, but everything to
do
with the fact that lisp people do not beleive in your fundamental
assumption
that there is a difference between "scripting" and "system programming"
languages.
In LISP there is a tradition, nearly 40 years old now, of a mixture of
interpreted, compiled, and mixed mode environments. Issues not unique to
LISP
of course, Reference for example Gordon Bell's classic book "Computer
Engineering,
a DIGITAL Perspective." But still, for some reason new lisp programmers
seem to
pick up on this more than newbees using other languages. Eventually of
course
everybody seems to crank out the need to write a compiler. Witness what is
happening
in the Perl community now.
However, I am one that beleives that the language battle is over.
There have been a number of operating systems which emphasize
language-independant "binary interface" component integration to
a sufficiently developed degree that multi-language projects are practical
and robust; however, Microsoft Windows 95/NT seems to have reached
a significant "breakthrough" level in a way that VMS or AS-400 did not.
Primarily because the developer community itself has been sold, kicking and
screaming!
dragged, pushed, whatever, on the component-integration religion.
Meanwhile, the Unix side continues to be "A House Divided Against Itself"
which I do not think can stand against a determined attack by a competitor
with the vast resources of Microsoft. (The anology is that Sun and the Unix
camp
is like the "South" and Microsoft is like the "North" with Oracle sitting
on the
sidelines much like a "Great Britain" did.)
It is horribly difficult for implementors (e.g. of Java, TCL) in the Unix
environment to
make multi-language projects robust with respect to all system conditions,
exceptions and future features.
Glue: Sure, glue is nice. But you cannot glue together wet wood. You have
to
cut away the rotting parts first before attempting a repair. And it is not
sound
to use glue to fill up gaps which are too large.
You guys integrating Java and TCL in the Unix environment really have your
work
cut out for you. Any serious competitor to Microsoft must address its
attack
from the point of view of component integration at the compiled-program
level,
and not merely be yet-another-platform-promising-portability while at the
same
time limiting implementors to a small set of languages.
-gjc
p.s. http://people.delphi.com/gjc reference for my own hacks.
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