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"... but this language, once released, will be fixed for a decade at least. Something with that lifespan should be great from day one." I'm not sure why the au

"... but this language, once released, will be fixed for a decade at least. Something with that lifespan should be great from day one." I'm not sure why the author believes that once the language ships it cannot change. Surely all languages evolve and change over time, it would be foolish to think Swift as it ships in September will not change for a decade after that.

chc 12y ago
A language that is constantly changing in fundamental ways is not usable for serious software. Languages are largely constrained by the choices that were made when they were released. See Python 3 for an example of what happens when a language tries to make breaking changes — and Python's were relatively minor! No language could thrive while going through that sort of strife constantly.
- danudey 12y ago
  Objective-C has added several features in recent years; things like bindings, dot notation, etc. are relatively new, but pretty substantial changes in terms of code clarity. As for Python 3, the Python community never intended for people to move over to Python 3 immediately, nor was it intended for people to move their Python projects from Python 2 to Python 3 unless they had some reason to (e.g. Django, public libraries, etc).
  - chc 12y ago
    Objective-C has added things, but it has largely not changed existing things. As I said in another comment, languages generally do not change — they just accrete. If you feel like a language is missing something, that might be fixable — but if you feel like a language either added the wrong thing or did something the wrong way (which is the OP's concern), that is a much more difficult problem, because after release you can't take away what's already there without making people angry.
wvenable 12y ago
Languages generally don't change -- they get added-to and very rarely removed-from but they don't often change. For example, it's usually very hard to add new keywords. So C++ for example, uses every possible keyword and symbol overloaded to provide new features to the point of ridiculousness. Java is on the same road. Python changed a few things and the split between 2.x and 3.x is still ongoing.
stormbrew 12y ago
This was about the pace of language development once upon a time. C++ changed glacially for its first 20 years, for example. Perl, Ruby, and Python also took pretty conservative approaches to language evolution (but kudos to Python for finding a way to encode versioning information into the code itself). I think Objective-C didn't really change all that much until the mid-2000s, probably in prep for iOS? So the expectation seems like it's probably based on real history, but things seem different now, though. Languages are evolving faster than before, even some of the ones that previously moved very slowly.
- chc 12y ago
  By and large, languages don't really change — they just accrete. It is very rare for something that used to work one way to later work another way. For example, languages generally do not go from being statement-based to being expression-based, or go from something being mutable to immutable, or eliminate operators. (MzScheme did the second one — it went from mutable to immutable defaults — and it was considered so significant that they stopped calling their language Scheme and renamed it Racket to avoid confusion!)
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    I agree this has historically been true, but again, I think this is changing. Ruby 1.9 and Python 3 both did more than accrete, they actively broke existing code in quite significant ways. C++ has so far avoided completely breaking changes, but with all the accretion it's doing now it's probably only a matter of time before some significant breaking changes happen lest it become even more ridiculously complex than it is now. Go has had breaking changes as well, I believe, but they have a smart upgrade tool to help with it. This is probably something that will catch on for other rapidly evolving languages. I think we'll see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future.
    - chc 12y ago
      Ruby and Python each did one release where they were willing to do significant changes. That's it — they're not doing it again for a good long while now. It's an isolated incident, not a trend in those languages' development practices that we can project into the future. Go did breaking changes pre-1.0, but they are now committed to providing a stable platform that only accretes features (http://golang.org/doc/go1compat http://golang.org/doc/go1compat).

chc 12y ago

A language that is constantly changing in fundamental ways is not usable for serious software. Languages are largely constrained by the choices that were made when they were released. See Python 3 for an example of what happens when a language tries to make breaking changes — and Python's were relatively minor! No language could thrive while going through that sort of strife constantly.

danudey 12y ago
Objective-C has added several features in recent years; things like bindings, dot notation, etc. are relatively new, but pretty substantial changes in terms of code clarity. As for Python 3, the Python community never intended for people to move over to Python 3 immediately, nor was it intended for people to move their Python projects from Python 2 to Python 3 unless they had some reason to (e.g. Django, public libraries, etc).
- chc 12y ago
  Objective-C has added things, but it has largely not changed existing things. As I said in another comment, languages generally do not change — they just accrete. If you feel like a language is missing something, that might be fixable — but if you feel like a language either added the wrong thing or did something the wrong way (which is the OP's concern), that is a much more difficult problem, because after release you can't take away what's already there without making people angry.

wvenable 12y ago

Languages generally don't change -- they get added-to and very rarely removed-from but they don't often change. For example, it's usually very hard to add new keywords. So C++ for example, uses every possible keyword and symbol overloaded to provide new features to the point of ridiculousness. Java is on the same road. Python changed a few things and the split between 2.x and 3.x is still ongoing.

stormbrew 12y ago

This was about the pace of language development once upon a time. C++ changed glacially for its first 20 years, for example. Perl, Ruby, and Python also took pretty conservative approaches to language evolution (but kudos to Python for finding a way to encode versioning information into the code itself). I think Objective-C didn't really change all that much until the mid-2000s, probably in prep for iOS? So the expectation seems like it's probably based on real history, but things seem different now, though. Languages are evolving faster than before, even some of the ones that previously moved very slowly.

chc 12y ago
By and large, languages don't really change — they just accrete. It is very rare for something that used to work one way to later work another way. For example, languages generally do not go from being statement-based to being expression-based, or go from something being mutable to immutable, or eliminate operators. (MzScheme did the second one — it went from mutable to immutable defaults — and it was considered so significant that they stopped calling their language Scheme and renamed it Racket to avoid confusion!)
- stormbrew 12y ago
  I agree this has historically been true, but again, I think this is changing. Ruby 1.9 and Python 3 both did more than accrete, they actively broke existing code in quite significant ways. C++ has so far avoided completely breaking changes, but with all the accretion it's doing now it's probably only a matter of time before some significant breaking changes happen lest it become even more ridiculously complex than it is now. Go has had breaking changes as well, I believe, but they have a smart upgrade tool to help with it. This is probably something that will catch on for other rapidly evolving languages. I think we'll see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future.
  - chc 12y ago
    Ruby and Python each did one release where they were willing to do significant changes. That's it — they're not doing it again for a good long while now. It's an isolated incident, not a trend in those languages' development practices that we can project into the future. Go did breaking changes pre-1.0, but they are now committed to providing a stable platform that only accretes features (http://golang.org/doc/go1compat http://golang.org/doc/go1compat).