DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language [LWN.net]

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 7, 2022 19:28 UTC (Sat) by littoral (guest, #140523)
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Why, oh why, do we need yet another programming language?

We don't.

Over a programmer's lifetime, probably more than 90% of his/her time is spent maintaining/enhancing/fixing existing code. The most effective way to increase programmer productivity would be to reduce the number of programming languages in existence. Inventing yet another one might possibly [giving the inventors of Hare every possible benefit of the doubt] increase programmer productivity in writing new code by between 1% and 2% - after, that it is, it gains enough users to get more or less debugged. But - if it ever gets to be popular - it then reduces programmer productivity in maintaining old code by more than 20% because they have to spend time learning a new language - and new libraries.

So, wow, somebody has given us the opportunity to reduce the overall lifetime productivity of programmers by adopting Hare. Let's do the smart thing. Ignore Hare, it'll then go away.

You would like to increase programmer productivity? That's a lot harder. The best way would be to write a program that converted, with 100% coverage, language X into language Y. For example, Perl to Python, or COBOL to anything. AFAIK that's never been done for any high-level language pair (X, Y) when neither strictly includes the other (e.g. C++ and C).

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 8, 2022 11:53 UTC (Sun) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480) [Link]

I look at new programming languages as experiments: the important point isn't to create something wonderful, but to either prove or disprove the practicality of things. Personally, I have little interest in experimenting but I am interested in reading about the results when people do. Thus I find it valuable when people try new things. Actually, I definitely applaud people trying things by creating something new instead of making stuff up and then ramming it into an existing popular language where if it doesn't work out we are all stuck with garbage for evermore. If things don't work out for a new language, it dies, no one remembers and there is little lasting harm, but if it does something awesome and it shows it is awesome, those pieces can be cherry-picked into the popular languages.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 9, 2022 5:29 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

If people in 2002 had decided that we don't need new languages, we wouldn't have had Go, or Rust, or Scala, or Kotlin, or (my favourite for scientific programming) Julia. What has changed in 2022 that we don't need new languages any more? Or are you saying we didn't need the above languages either?

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 9, 2022 8:35 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Or, going back further; by 1960 we had FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL and COBOL. Why did we bother with C, FORTH, Smalltalk, BASIC, Prolog, SQL, ML, Pascal, Logo, Common Lisp, Ada, Objective-C, Haskell, Python, R, Ruby, Java, Delphi, PHP, JavaScript, C#, the ones you named, and more, when we had "enough" programming languages?

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 10, 2022 13:55 UTC (Tue) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

> Why, oh why, do we need yet another programming language?
> We don't.

We do, because
1) unfortunately most languages have very serious design issues (C integer promotions rules for example)
2) languages are often never "changed", new features are added but design issues are left unchanged..

Unfortunately there are many C "would be replacer": Odin, Zig, V, Hare now (quite a few other in the Pascal family), this will spread thin contributors and delay the adoption of a "popular" C's replacement language.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 15, 2022 5:37 UTC (Sun) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

Never heard about V, thanks for the tip! There is some very interesting stuff there. Just tried it, there are some issues (invalid memory accesses and crashes when using wrong argument type to some functions without even a warning at build time, memory leaks like crazy triggering the OOM killer in a few seconds, and being 20 times slower than C on a the Vweb server test), but it looks well balanced, very likely suitable for scripting, and I like the fact that it translates to/from C. It looks quite young and we can hope that some of the problems above (invalid memory accesses an OOM) will get solved soon. It definitely deserves being watched!