One unfortunate problem with adopting a new language is the lack of quality libraries, or the total absence of libraries, and another is the lack of IDE support, especially refactoring.
- Libraries
Its probably the case that many languages suffer for a long time, and never make it because they are lacking libraries. Ruby seems to have gotten over it somehow, despite starting from scratch. It took 10-15 years for it to catch on however. Clearly starting from scratch was Hard. If a language can make it from scratch, you know its special. (I should look into JRuby because I wonder if that somehow gets Ruby access to Java code. I don't think thats the case, I think its just compiling Ruby into class files to run on the JVM)
Scala gets over this problem by having full access to all Java libraries. However, I suspect that in doing so you have to sacrifice some potentially high quality features. For example Scala code is allowed to call Java constructors and as I've mentioned a few times now - theres something fundamentally flawed about construction in general. DIF's exist simply to solve that deficiency in the Java, but in the end, the language is still flawed. Does that mean the flaw carries over into Scala? I suspect at least somewhat. I'm going to continue researching this.
Either choice, from scratch, or library inheritance poses its issues. I'm not sure which way I'm leaning at this point.
- IDE Support
This leads to to an obvious question: Is it possible to avoid this approach? That is, is it possible to create a new language that leverages existing IDE support? I suspect that it is, but I'm certain some research needs to be done on it.
IDE's are essentially compiler based. And Eclipse in particular is completely pluggable. What if you could plug in the compiler? It it possible to write refactorings generic enough that given the correct compiler, the refactoring could work across any language? Possible I assume, but difficult. Many Eclipse Java refactorings for example, simply print out Java code and then have the compiler recompile. These refactorings certainly would not work on other languages.
It might not be possible at all, but its certainly worth looking into. Until then early adopters will have to suffer though lack of support, until someone (quite likely them) builds that support. Language adoption will continue to take some time.
Wouldn't it be nice if anyone (well, anyone that can write a compiler) could create their own language and have it automatically fully integrated into an IDE with full refactoring support and all the other features? Then all we'd need is support in the IDE to easily create new languages and compilers. Then we'd be looking at thousands of languages that we could possibly adopt. Domain specific languages would be so much easier to create. So many possibilities I should really just stop talking.
Yes, JRuby does give you access to Java code. It's the #1 appeal to JRuby at the moment-- the ability to write software composed of a some Java libraries, maybe a Ruby library, and some clean small Ruby code to paste it together.
ReplyDeleteCurrently it's about 10x slower than Ruby for software I've written, but they say some day that'll change. Ont the plus side it was real easy for me to try JRuby, just an apt-get install under ubuntu and BAM I was running my ruby code.