Re: Lua voices

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Dibyendu Majumdar once stated:
> 
> But to be honest, only the Lua
> team would qualify as the few capable of language design. The rest of
> us: do we have anything to show that would qualify us as great
> language designers?

  What makes a language designer "great"?

  I really hate the notion that only a select few people are capable of
designing a language.  I don't think anyone here will claim that Bill Gates
is a "great" language designer, yet his BASIC language was arguably one of
the most successful languages in use (Apple ][, Atari, Commodore, Tandy,
IBM, all used Microsoft BASIC).  C has problems (many problems) and if the
consensus on Hacker News [1] or Lobsters [2] are any indication, anyone
using C should be arrested (at best), so that leaves out K & R as "great"
language designers.  I personally despise the philosophy of Java and Go [3]
so I don't consider Gosling or Pike to be "great" language designers [4] (I
would also throw Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, in with this
group---he too, does not trust programmers).

  Larry Wall [5] was a *linguist*, not a computer scientist and yet
people *love* Perl (or loved---it's considered "legacy" these days).  And a
lack of programming experience never stopped Rasmus Lerdorf [6] from
creating PHP.

  Anyone can create a programming language.  The trick is getting people to
*use* it.

  -spc (*I* even created a language while in college!  It's not that hard)

[1]	http://news.ycombinator.com/

[2]	http://lobste.rs/

[3]	Don't trust the programmer with any advanced features; they're too
	dumb to understand and the advanced features will be abused.

[4]	The have large corporations pushing their agenda unto us.

[5]	Creator of Perl.

[6]	http://www.azquotes.com/author/47278-Rasmus_Lerdorf