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A Little Language Talk

By SD Times News Team

December 1, 2004 — (Page 1 of 3)
A mini-theme of this column recently has been “little languages,” solutions that may not combine the flexibility, familiarity and approachability that characterize (one hopes) mainstream languages, but that provide, within your particular area of interest, great advantages. The phrase “little languages” comes from one of the most influential articles of the 1980s, written by Jon Bentley in 1986. In it he showed how “examining programs under a linguistic light can give you a better understanding of the tools you now use, and can teach you design principles for building elegant interfaces to your future programs.”

The article, available at portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315691, presents elegant graphics-producing programs in a fraction of the space they’d require with any of today’s mainstream languages. Although Bentley’s article caused a sensation, “the linguistic light” was drowned out by the blazing arrival of event-driven GUIs, object-oriented programming and the World Wide Web.

A fundamental premise of .NET is that a platform that is explicitly designed to support multiple languages and programming approaches is superior to a platform, notably Java, whose design is dominated by the needs of a single language.

I am convinced that Microsoft is sincere in trying to give the .NET managed platform as much flexibility as possible, albeit for the purely mercenary purpose of being in a position to exploit advances as they enter the mainstream.

Whitehorse, IronPython, F#, XAML, Cv…these are hardly the “master in a day, implement in a few” languages proposed by Bentley. Cv, in particular, should not be attempted without first wrapping your head in duct tape so as to prevent your skull from exploding.

We’ll revisit Cv in future columns; it’s a fascinating language whose features may be incorporated in mainstream languages such as C# and VB.NET in the post-Longhorn time frame (emphasis on “may”), but for now suffice it to say that it’s a language that integrates the worlds of objects, SQL and XML on the premise that programmers have to deal with all three anyway.

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