
Open Dylan - brudgers
http://opendylan.org/index.html
======
BruceM
I do a lot of the work on and with Open Dylan.

So, why?

Rather than point to any particular language feature or design aspect of the
language (which are what originally drew me to Dylan), the thing that keeps me
there now is that it is a green field.

If one has newer or different ideas about how things could be done or
structured, this can't really be introduced coherently and consistently across
a language ecosystem that is already big. I think Node did well at the start
in part due to being able to build everything new with non-blocking I/O in
mind. That's unlike the use of Twisted in Python which had a number of caveats
when working the standard library (and now there are a number of other non-
blocking I/O libraries).

The other side is that I do it because I enjoy it and we're building something
good.

We do have some good language features (like multiple dispatch as someone else
has mentioned), we have some pretty good documentation, our upcoming LLVM
compiler back-end is generating good code, we have a good debugging story.

People start languages all the time. I find it best to just pretend that Dylan
isn't an old language, but something new that is being created on the grave of
Open Dylan. We're working on changes to the type system, the compiler, the
libraries, and soon, I'll be starting in on some stuff that takes advantage of
our green field status. We just didn't go and start a new language from
scratch, but decided to build upon the massive amount of work and design that
went into Old-Dylan.

~~~
joshsharp
Hi Bruce! Good to see Open Dylan getting some attention on HN :)

~~~
BruceM
Maybe? (I'm going to leave where I am shortly on a 6+ hour drive. I'm on
holiday in the US for another several days.)

I was talking with someone else last night that has worked on and with Dylan
for the last 20 years or so over dinner.

He commented "I'm sometimes afraid to use Dylan as I don't know if someone
will be supporting the compiler." I replied that "I'm afraid to support the
compiler sometimes as maybe no one will use it."

That said, I've put some years of effort into it and have been actively
maintaining the compiler for a while now. Now I'm building up libraries that I
need for my green field project and working on some language changes to
support that.

I'm now working on a 2-5 year time frame.

That said, if we got another like-minded hacker out of any attention, I'd fall
over from joy. We have so many things that we need help with, especially
things like type system work, but also plenty of easier things.

------
n0on3
I had a quick lock at the website, the 'history' page, the 'old.' website
etc., but I still didn't get an answer to a very basic question for a
programming language which is: why?

Somewhere in a post from a couple of years ago I read "a vision of a different
world: one with the flexibility of Smalltalk, the power of Lisp, while still
allowing for compilation to efficient code", but as someone said in a comment
to the link of that post in HN these these are already covered (and if not,
they have a lot of people working on them) by other more popular (and more
friendly imho, from the few examples I had a look to) languages..

So again, why Dylan?

~~~
cmrdporcupine
The 'killer app' of Dylan is (IMO) multiple dispatch. I believe that it
changes significantly (in a good way) how the behaviour of programs can be
modelled. But the 'Why Dylan' document fails to do a good job of putting that
front and centre and explaining its utility and excellence.

~~~
BruceM
We would welcome help from fresh eyes on improving that sort of material on
the website.

------
omaranto
From the perspective of a hobbyist programmer, the compiler seems very
"enterprisey": it doesn't look like you can just stick a program in a file and
run it or put some functions in a file and load them into a REPL. Instead it
seems you have to make an "application" with some specified directory
structure and several files indicating where to find things and so on. I guess
that's what a serious programmer would do anyway, but it's a little off-
putting to people like me.

------
stesch
Old HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339952)

