From: Tyler Zesiger Date: 2004-06-11T04:06:52+09:00 Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Unit tests ... not just for the young Phil Tomson wrote: > In article <40C898AF.8000706@zesiger.com>, > Tyler Zesiger wrote: > >>Ruby and Dylan kind of remind me of each other. They were both conceived >>at about the same time. Dylan is designed to be a "production" language, >>capable of replacing C/C++. I'm just barely getting into it, but I liked >>it better than Eiffel, and it seems to have a great future even though >>it's largely ignored so far. It consistently ranks well in the ICFP >>lanugages contest - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/proj/plclub/contest/ - But >>as far as I know, there's not much production code written using Dylan. >> >>Apple had financial troubles and dropped the Dylan project. Bob Dylan >>won millions of dollars out of a lawsuit over the fact that Dylan was >>distributed on a CD with the word "Dylan" on the front. And Dylan seems >>to be only now catching up to where it should have been in the mid 1990's. > > > Now days Apple uses Objective C quite a lot. They don't seem to be doing > anything with Dylan anymore. [snip] > You should probably check out Objective C - it's used in actual production > code (See the Cocoa framework from Apple). ObjC can be used as a more > dynamically typed language or as a statically typed language or both so > it's rather flexible in that way. It's C with some added OO > functionality (I tend to like the ObjC OO philosophy better than > C++'s, though I've only played with ObjC a little) and recently added > exceptions. I'm not sure that anyone is > using Dylan for 'work' anymore, so I'm not sure if it's 'ready to work'. > > Phil I think Dylan's close enough to being ready to work, for me. I'm not concerned that it isn't as well supported because my timeline is a bit farther out, and I think it's doing well. I'm more concerned about the joy of programming than meeting deadlines, at least at this stage. So, the newer, better designed languages appeal to me more. The libraries, commercial products, and community support will follow I'm sure, though being a decade old language, I don't think I can call myself an early adopter for Dylan. As an aside, I'm fairly new to programming, and it might be beneficial to have to learn to roll my own libraries for Dylan, rather than just plugging something else in that was written and debugged 10 years ago. I'll be able to contribute something simple but significant, without being overshadowed by those that came before me.