The Definitive Programming Language, Not
Peter Van Roy recently claimed (article, slides) that there are signs of a Definitive Programming Language emerging that, as he put it, gives
good solutions at its level of abstraction, allowing computer science researchers to move on and work at higher levels.
The argument is based on the observation that four languages, designed independently and for different purposes all arrived at the same layered language design of
- strictly functional language at the core
- deterministic concurrency (aka dataflow concurrency)
- asynchronous message passing
- global mutable state
The claim is that the odds of this happening at random are the same as lightning striking in the same place four times and that instead we should consider this particular language structure as a definitive design that arises naturally and inevitably.
Unfortunately these claims do not stand up to scrutiny.
Continue Reading 3 comments June 13th, 2006 matthias