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From: jwl@miki.cs.bris.ac.uk (John Lloyd)
Subject: Re: The Grand Challenge
Message-ID: <D9pEz1.9JJ@info.bris.ac.uk>
Sender: jwl@miki (John Lloyd)
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Organization: Unviversity of Bristol, Dept of Computer Science
References:  <3qkhmj$e5s@hitchcock.dfki.uni-sb.de>
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 14:30:37 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.prolog:13167 comp.lang.functional:5997 comp.constraints:685 comp.object.logic:463


In article <3qkhmj$e5s@hitchcock.dfki.uni-sb.de>, vanroy@dfki.uni-sb.de (Peter Van Roy) writes:
|> The Grand Challenge in Programming Languages
|> --------------------------------------------
|> 
|> The Grand Challenge in programming languages is to build a *single* simple and
|> practical system with *maximum* expressiveness.  There is *no* system that
|> provides such useful notions as concurrency, constraints, full compositionality,
|> lexical scoping, search, typing, distribution and persistence, while remaining
|> *simple*.  Is this Grand Challenge ludicrous?  Well, no.  Major progress has
|> been made.  But there is still much to do.

I believe this to be a thoroughly inappropriate Grand Challenge. There will never 
be such an ultimate language - simply because of the wide range of applications we
have to cope with. A more sensible Grand Challenge would be to create 3 or 4 
languages using different but related paradigms to cover the variety of 
applications - that is, we want to create an "ultimate family of languages".

For example, there is another class - the declarative languages - which will have
a successor in this ultimate family of languages. This class currently 
includes Prolog, CLP(R), Prolog III, Alf, Babel, Goedel, Mercury, Escher, and 
others. (Actually, some of these are not all that declarative - but at
least they try to be!) For a wide range of applications, the declarative family 
is more suitable than the CC family (as indeed there are many applications 
for which CC languages are more suitable than declarative ones).

It might be interesting to speculate on what other classes of languages will
be represented in the ultimate family.

John Lloyd
