One thing I always liked about some older languages was being able to have blanks in identifiers. Although I see that they actually managed to invent a new stropping variant that doesn't work with that… For the "kids"…
That's a cruel alternate universe, I would've hoped that Motif being in use by more people than just the devs of one homebrew Unix desktop would mean that we wouldn't have suffered through that much versionitis.
The version number was just a joke. But if the "standard unix gui toolkit" was under an open source license back in the 1990s, I am sure people would have run with that rather than inventing something else.
from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful
it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`
I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)
I'm also pretty sure that there was an "Elixir" in IT before there was the language said framework is written in… I mean, given that the letter "X" is in both Unix and X11, I'm pretty sure most words containing it have already been used once or twice.
(I still think they should've stuck with "Firebird", little danger of confusing a browser with a database system mostly used by Delphi devs)
Seems everyone has. Which is weird, given how bad everything looks despite this focus.
I'm not sure what's going on in the design world. I mean, of course there's the influence of the web design spheres. The web didn't have the GUI standards that e.g. Macs were known for. In the beginning, they couldn't emulate the desktops. Toolkits like ExtJS tried, but you stated with the basic problem that you didn't know what desktop you wanted to emulate. Windows? Mac?
By the time the browser caught up, the damage already had been done, and the stop-gap solutions and styles more suitable for ads created a "web style". Flashy, flat, deserts of whitespace. The aesthetic stranglehold this had then not only persisted, but crossed over first into mobile (the somewhat standardized look & feel of early iOS quickly vanished), then the desktop.
And now nobody knows where they're going, despite having more people solely focused on "UX" than ever before. But you need to do something to justify your position/salary, and that's how we get the Microsoft/Apple designs of the last decade or so. And not having any ideas beyond type systems or init replacements, the open source world just emulates that.
For a short while, I ran the Eumel operating system and wrote an application in Elan. Among other interesting properties, files weren't saved, but were checkpointed by the OS. I enjoyed this exercise, although Eumel remained a very small niche.
A lot of C# and Java code is oriented towards web backends, too. Which are quite big and complex. So it seems natural that languages in the same design space (trad OO) converge on similar features. I think the only exception these days is Go.
I think these days you could change "You can write Fortran in any language" to "You can structure your code like Spring in any language"…
Perl? Are there existing modules for the Linux KMS interface? Otherwise this would also be an off-beat language choice, and these days with only marginally more developers… (And I say that as a Perl fan)
Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)
No, I haven't meant to imply that Perl should be used for the subj. But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml. All depends on the programmer unsurprisingly.
Unlike Perl, OCaml is AOT compiled in a very efficient machine code, has a good static type system and has a good concurrency support. Both are not very mainstream.
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