Rambles around computer science

Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time

Tue, 16 Dec 2014

For and against languages

A colleague recently summarised my research's position, not unkindly and partly in jest, as “against languages”. One one level there's some truth in that. I decry language-specific toolchains, runtimes, debuggers and package managers; I scoff at claimed benefits of being “100%” “pure” <your language here>, I am endlessly sceptical of anyone trumpeting one language too loudly. In my own work, I am preoccupied with language-agnostic runtimes, linkers and debuggers, cross-language composition and language-agnostic program analyses.

But that doesn't mean I dislike languages—far from it! Language innovations deliver their highest net value when we're free to pick the right one for the job, and when it's possible to adopt new languages without suffering massive pain. This also means it must be easy to migrate away from a language. It's only by humbly accepting any one language's inevitable imperfection that we can use each language to its best advantage, and can accommodate progress in languages generally.

Not all code is alike, and the world doesn't change overnight. We should therefore expect code in multiple languages to coexist. The alternative is getting stuck with the “current” and never making it into the “new”. We need to think of coexistence of languages not as a one-time transitional measure on our way to the perfect language, but as inevitable, ongoing reality. Even if we consider a particular language to be “legacy”, “outdated” or “broken”, we shouldn't make dealing with that language a second-class use case. If we are to have progress, we must give these scenarios first-class consideration. (This is why I lambast the status quo of “foreign function interfaces”, and in fact the very idea of them.)

So it's not that I'm against languages. I'm interested in making language innovations as useful as possible. I'd say that makes me more strongly in favour of languages than many people.

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