Anonymous (you again?) writes in a comment...
Not sure what you mean by the "baggage in all the specific object model stuff".Consider the Common Language Specification. There is a lot of unnecessary stuff there. The design is begging to be more stratified. (See "Lisp: a Language for Stratified Design (ps))
Reading from "Smalltak-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice" (1983, pdf), Dan Ingalls writes...
You clearly want the kernel to be as small as possible, so that you encounter barriers to change as infrequently as possible.Given todays computational power relative to 20 years ago, reducing barriers to change is a nearly universal overriding quality we want in software systems. Certainly that is why dotnet itself has replaced C++ as Microsoft's vehicle for software development. Before that, a popular Microsoft combination was to use VB for most of the flexibility and C++ for the "services" available to VB to munge about.
The gravitational pull of this progression is centered in Lisp and Smalltalk. Undeniably the progression of the popular languages is essentially toward these spheres of influence. Along the way, ML and Haskell and other systems of course. (But even ML and Haskell come out of the *Lisp* and functional programming community.)
If you are looking for true enlightenment, read Richard Kelsey's "Realistic Compilation by Program Transformation" (1989). And if you get hooked and need a deeper fix, read the original lambda papers by Guy Steele.
Yes, the CLR has some baggage.
1 comment:
The CLR is trying to do something difficult. It's not just the kernel upon which languages can be built, but an infrastructure so that languages can be intimately combined.
I suspect that there are some combinations that are poorly thought out. For instance, I don't think cross-language inheritance is useful or productive -- better to provide good alternatives (e.g., delegation); language implementations can pretend those alternatives are subclassing if they really desire to. But cross-language data sharing, including the sharing of objects, is quite important. You can't do that without some significant spec.
Now, it might be a better, more evolutionary approach to put different languages on the same VM, and let them figure out the interoperability issues later. But even though that's a different process, it just delays the work, it doesn't remove it.
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