Objects are awesome. What if we made a PL where everything was an object?
Lazy evaluation is awesome. What if we made a PL where every data type was lazy?
Extremist programming (no relation to extreme programming) is the act of taking some principle, elevating it above everything else and applying it everywhere. After the dust settles, people often look at this extremism and think, “Well, that was kind of interesting, but using X in Y was clearly inappropriate. You need to use the right tool for the job!”
Here’s the catch: sometimes you
should use the
wrong tool for the job because it might be the right tool, and you just don’t know it yet. If you aren’t trying to use functions everywhere, you might not realize the utility of functions that take functions as arguments [1] or cheap lambdas [2]. If you aren’t trying to use objects everywhere, you might not realize that both integers [3] and the class of an object [4] are also objects. If you aren’t trying to use l
Is there still research to be done in Programming Languages? This essay touches both on the topic of programming languages and on the nature of research work. I am mostly concerned in analyzing this question in the context of Academia, i.e. within the expectations of academic programs and research funding agencies that support research work in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). This is not the only possible perspective, but it is the one I am taking here.
PLs are dear to my heart, and a considerable chunk of my career was made in that area. As a designer, there is something fundamentally interesting in designing a language of any kind. It’s even more interesting and gratifying when people actually start exercising those languages to create non-trivial software systems. As a user, I love to use programming languages that I haven’t used before, even when the languages in question make me curse every other line.