“Expressiveness matters”

Monday, 11 Apr 2005

Brian McCallister:

It reminds me, a great deal, of a conversation I had with a really bright guy who re-implemented (okay, actually pre-implemented, or co-implemented) something very popular in the open source world (written in C) in OCaml. After beating on it for a while he concluded that the basis for the whole design was broken, but he attributes being able to see why the whole design was broken to the expressiveness of the language, not to any abstract conceptual model. The C version is in widespread use, releases bug fix versions quite frequently, and a lot of people wonder if it will ever actually be stable.

Via Bill de hÓra.