[FoRK] Armor-piercing silver bullets

[Luis Villa]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 7:21 AM, Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
> So what's their secret sauce?

Ahhh. There are a variety of secret sauces. Among them: 'and by the
way there is quite a bit of domain-specific code in the compiler' and
'well, this isn't really compliant with the spec.' Still a really
interesting annual report; my sense is that there may be some
substance in amongst the obfuscation and the ivory-tower-ness, and
that certainly the direction they are headed (basically: extreme
abstraction + extremely domain-specific languages) is probably the
right one for most use cases. It is painful to think that people are
still writing in C.

Luis

P.S. VPRI must be the only group on earth that (1) is doing very
serious programming language research and (2) has Quincy Jones on
their board of directors.

P.P.S. You can tell Alan Kay is involved because there is quite a bit
of 'if only _____ had been done with what we knew in 1969 in mind it'd
be waaaaay better.' While he's undoubtedly right about that in some
ways, in other ways whenever I see Kay speak or read something he's
written I get this nagging feeling that he's unable to see the good
parts of anything done since '69.