Re: Notes from Henry

On Tue, 2016-02-09 at 19:20 -0600, Norman Walsh wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Henry is having trouble with git. I checked in 
> 
> https://github.com/xproc/notes/tree/master/design
> 


We may or may not need more resources - many of the most successful
languages were designed by one or two people, but people with some
significant time & energy available. I have a poster to invite people
to contribute, but they won't see it until it's too late to come
tomorrow, although I did send an announcement.

Perl might feel unpleasant (or C++, or Python, or even JavaScript) but
part of this comes from "provide mechanism, make hard things possible,
be as orthogonal as possible within the design" -- e.g. anywhere you
can put an expression you can put any expression. XQuery also has a
high degree of orthogonality. Our target audience might be happier with
a mix of Perl and XQuery and XSLT than with OOCAML and C++.

Possibly we could get some reviews at various stages from some SIGPLAN
people, especially if we present the language as a hedge-based
choreographing mechanism (to avoid certain phobias)...

High-level diagrams may be an effective way forward, but let's also
have just enough of a draft syntax that we can get a feel for whether
something might work, and for where some of the challenges might be.

Biggest question for me - what's the metric for success that's most
inportant to the WG? I _think_ it's a pipeline language that people in
the XML, data integration, middleware, scripting, text processing and
prodction worlds find easy to use and learn, and find useful.



Liam

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2016 06:44:34 UTC