I'm concerned about a few things with modern development, and this is why my languages of choice right now are lua, python, and C; with Forth and Lisp in the "would like to use more ideas from" area:
Vendor lock-in, and Vendor "OURS. NOT YOURS. YOU MAY NOT USE ANY LONGER. ALSO: NO LONGER SUPPORTED" things. Java, Go, and Rust are all encumbered by being non-free (no, really, they aren't. They're OWNED by a vendor. You can use the language, but it's not OPEN. It's "free and open" the Ajit Pai way: "lie about it.")
Then Javascript is being absorbed by Microsoft; so it's out of the question also... better said here: https://clarity.kleydints.com/a-post-mortem-in-5-acts-of-how-microsoft-privatized-open-source-killing-javascript-in-the-process-62ee5fc77d9e?%20gi=2c12df284732&gi=413aed166008 )
Ability to be used in smaller environments: Yes, I know, 32GB is the minimum acceptable thing today. That's insane and "what if someone can't afford that?" The poor exist. They should have the same abilities people with some money do. And we ALL should have the same amount of access/abilities as those who make a billion dollars by sitting on their ass and doing nothing while the financial systems give them bonuses for being at the top of the mountain.
But I like my older machines, and there's nothing inherently WRONG with them. The whole "buy a new thing because the old things are useless!" attitude feeds into the whole "crush right to repair" thing, at least I see similarities. Sure, new is neat, but when new becomes old, tossing it makes... environmental waste...
And things like Javascript cross-platform "applications" (which are just Chrome instances in a "sandbox" - but is it a good sandbox? I somehow doubt it, given the vendors... ) and on top of that, the memory footprint... and yes, I've done things like this as well in python, where I'm using the memory that I have to solve an issue, rather than using something less memory intensive... but then I'm doing that to solve an immediate problem, and not releasing that code for others. I.e. I'm "coding for the device I have" not "coding for a wide variety of different devices."
I'm seeing far too many things being developed in the vendor locked languages, and there aren't alternatives.
I'm concerned that at some point we'll lose those tools, or we'll be in a situation where we'll have to deal with NOT having those tools until they're rewritten in another language.
I'd very much like a truely "owned by the people" language that doesn't have the problems of C pointers, which would be able to be used on processors that aren't from this age. i.e. if it works on 6502,z80, and 68000: I'd be happier. And yes, that means no mmu things. "MMU if you have it, this extension if you do not" would be ok. After all, if you don't HAVE an MMU, you probably aren't looking at needing to manage memory automatically...
Anyway just thoughts, based on seeing yet another project written in JS, Go, or Rust, with no "backwards compatible" vision. I'm worried those will suddenly be removed from us by a hostile vendor.
Because all vendors are hostile.
Hi, @mjd totally agree.
Given your desires, you might like #Wirth's #Oberon, both as a language and operating system (I do not know if it needs a MMU, though, but to be honest a MMU looks like a quite reasonable hw requirement to me, even just for security reasons).
As for your "free" language of choice, I used to agree more in the past. #Lua is likely a good choice because it's possible to study its implementation in a week, but can we say the same about #C and #Python?
I used to like both a lot but
- Python is complex and its standard library is huge
- C is quite simple (I have no issue with pointers, more with it's syntax, too arcane for beginners) but its standard includes a crazy standard library
In general we should consider any program that requires more than a month to be completely understood in a month broken by design as locked to a few vendors OR an élite.
Thus how broken are #GCC, #Clang, #CPython, #NodeJS and so on?
