On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 1:34 PM Jan Mercl <0xj...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 13:07 Jesper Louis Andersen < > jesper.louis.ander...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> At some point, it is going to be "generally accepted" at which point >> languages without sum types are going to be regarded as a relic of the >> past. >> > > I hope to be dead for a long time then. > > Don't get me wrong, the advantages are clear. But I think it would be > horrible to blindly apply this approach everywhere and consider anything > else a relic. > >> Let me moderate it a bit then.
Programming languages never cease to exist. There is far too much code out there for this to happen. You may consider a language a relic, yet there are still people doing useful work in those languages. Either because the language has some unique features which are hard to replicate (Prolog, APL, and Forth comes to mind), or because the body of code in those languages is so large that it acts like inertia by itself. As a general rule of thumb, it looks like the incubation time for a PL concept is about 40 years. This was true with garbage collection, and might also hold for sum types. Hopefully we'll get Type&Effect systems before I stop programming. -- J. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAGrdgiWe_AH_QmATAz1srTzTZ5s-Fa0Gvb-sEx-_5A-GXH_wGQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
