| I do a lot of the work on and with Open Dylan. So, why? Rather than point to any particular language feature or design aspect of the language (which are what originally drew me to Dylan), the thing that keeps me there now is that it is a green field. If one has newer or different ideas about how things could be done or structured, this can't really be introduced coherently and consistently across a language ecosystem that is already big. I think Node did well at the start in part due to being able to build everything new with non-blocking I/O in mind. That's unlike the use of Twisted in Python which had a number of caveats when working the standard library (and now there are a number of other non-blocking I/O libraries). The other side is that I do it because I enjoy it and we're building something good. We do have some good language features (like multiple dispatch as someone else has mentioned), we have some pretty good documentation, our upcoming LLVM compiler back-end is generating good code, we have a good debugging story. People start languages all the time. I find it best to just pretend that Dylan isn't an old language, but something new that is being created on the grave of Open Dylan. We're working on changes to the type system, the compiler, the libraries, and soon, I'll be starting in on some stuff that takes advantage of our green field status. We just didn't go and start a new language from scratch, but decided to build upon the massive amount of work and design that went into Old-Dylan. |
I'm glad to see it. My hobby is programming languages and its amazing how many of the older languages have concepts and constructs superior to modern languages. We keep forgetting things we learned in this profession, and its nice to see someone dusting off the old ruins and rebuilding with an eye to some new understandings.