[staunton]

Very "poetic" presentation but the ideas don't speak to me.

> The goal of a compiler author is that their language live.

No it isn't. The goal is that the language is useful over time while discounting the future. Languages should die eventually when the circumstances thamade them useful change.

[skdotdan]

I’d add that while languages should die, code written in it shouldn’t. So, even if a language is deprecated, we still should be able to run, call and interoperate with all the legacy code that was written in it.

[TheMode]

Dying because no code is written in it, or dying because nobody is able to run it isn't the same.

We shouldn't prevent language from dying, but they shouldn't either due to lack of maintenance.

[adamthekiwi]

I definitely agree with you; languages should die, and they should die when their usefulness ends. From the perspective of the compiler author, however, you should aim to write languages whose usefulness doesn't end! :)

Also, thanks for the feedback!

[taylodl]

I look at it as they're are two types of languages - computer science languages which are for researching new concepts in computer science and software engineering languages which are used for building applications for commercial use and who's lifetimes may reach up to 20 or more years.

Languages in the first class should die quickly. They're intended to be for research. They tend to have a longer lifetime than they should when people use these languages for commercial use. Languages in the second class should be long-lived as the systems depending on them may be long lived. Some of the useful language features from the research languages may be introduced into the software engineering languages. C++ is a great example of this as it has been borrowing concepts from research languages for some time now.

[WalterBright]

The goal of the D language is to enable the realization of ideas by shifting the way programmers think.