Alex Steer

131 words | ~1 min

Wired has a bizarre piece about some computer scientists who think they've invented a general-purpose programming language that overcomes the flaws of all the others:

Bezanson had recently made a study of [programming] language design, and had come to the conclusion that the tradeoffs inherent in most languages were avoidable. “It became clear that a lot of it had been designed haphazardly,” Bezanson says. “If you started from the beginning, you could recreate the things that people liked about those languages without so many of the problems.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Good to see contemporary computer scientists repeating the errors of 17th-century clergymen. Certainty can be a terrible thing.