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The future of Nice

2006-08-03
2013-05-02
  • Nobody/Anonymous

    When I look at Nice, I see what I presume is the future of mainstream programming languages.  Maybe not Nice (probably not Nice), but features of Nice that will make it into the next generation of programming languages, like Java and C# are today.  Type inference, higher order functions, etc..  I don't look at languages like Ruby, Python, Lisp, Haskell because there's too much pain in going cold turkey from the abundance of existing libraries.

    I would put languages like Boo, Nemerle, Scala, and Groovy in that category too.  What they have in common is that they all were designed to run on top of existing virtual machines and to be able to easily consume the existing libraries of the first class languages of those environments.

    Now unlike the other languages I mentioned, Nice has multi-methods built in.  Multi-methods solve an important problem of open data types that variants in functional languages don't solve.  So I think Nice does have a unique position in the category of languages that were specifically built for existing VMs.

    But my question is what can we do to improve future of adoption of Nice?  It's easy to say that people should just dive into the code and submit patches, but in the real world we know that things are more complicated than that.

    The skillset needed to do compiler work is higher than your average application developer skillset and typically you have one or maybe two people that really know the codebase of a compiler and the native libraries to that language.

    So I guess my real question is what are Daniel's plans for Nice?  Are there other people that he could recruit to work on Nice.  Would Sun maybe be interested in Nice like they somewhat are with Groovy?  What can we do to promote Nice?  Is Nice just destined to be a nice Phd disseration for Daniel, but doomed for mainstream adoption?

    Thoughts?

     
    • all-x

      all-x - 2006-08-03

      The most important is IDE support. Java is not only compiler & JVM, it's Eclipse, NetBeans & IDEA.

       
      • Nobody/Anonymous

        Completely agree.  That and getting to a 1.0 release are probably the biggest stumbling blocks.

         
      • karolrvn

        karolrvn - 2008-03-21

        .

         
    • Daniel Bonniot

      Daniel Bonniot - 2006-08-03

      I haven't really had the time to work on Nice recently. I should be able to find some spare time if there are serious bugs that need fixing. I think I should have some time from the begining of next year to bring the core language to 1.0 status.

      I'm not optimistic about Sun supporting Nice. I think the best chancewould be to build a community around the language (but then I might be wrong).

      I completely agree that editor support is crucial for wider adoption. This is significant work, but it is also quite easy to work on it without getting into the inner workings of the compiler, so I really hope that one or more people can step in and tackle this task.

       
      • Nobody/Anonymous

        Thanks for the reply Daniel.  I guess the consensus is that an Eclipse plugin is what is really needed.  This seems to be the major problem with alternative languages on the JVM and CLR.  Developers are so used to these powerful IDE features for Java that they are heistant to give them up for more powerful language features.  Ideally, we want the best of both worlds.

        I started working on an IDE plugin for a language for the CLR, so I doubt I'll be contributing to the Eclipse plugin anytime soon.  But hopefully someone else will pick it up.

        Good luck in your endeavors.

         
        • karolrvn

          karolrvn - 2008-03-21
           

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