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Language Design

JacquesC 2381
March 12 2007
1
Just came across and interesting blog post on language design, focusing on the architecture versus features dimension. Trying to place Maple on this, it pretty much has to co-exist with Perl in the Pragmatic column. For comparisons' sake, one would have to place Mathematica in the Consistent column. The arrow of time graph is quite interesting. Maple is firmly a 'mature platform'. Whether it is 'bloated' is a very subjective call at this point; people of a more minimalist bent would certainly say so, but compared to something like Perl or C++, it most definitely is not. However, it is rather inevitable that it will become bloated: Maplesoft needs to push out new versions for people to upgrade to, and to be able to sell those, 'new' features have to be there to warrant an upgrade, right? Taking that as granted, the interesting point to ponder would be: what would that huge refactoring step look like? For the sake of argument, let's call the result Oak. What are the features of Maple that just scream to be unified? More to the point perhaps, what are the inconsistencies that should be resolved, as enablers to unification/refactoring?
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