I have met Shapiro and he is a very nice and smart guy, but I find it rather shocking that somebody could invest so much time and effort in designing new language before building a library to do something as fundamental as I/O.
Is interesting to contrast his approach building BitC to that of Ken Thompson and Rob Pike (both former colleagues of his at Bell Labs) building Go.
Go has been criticized for "not paying attention to PL research", which might be true, but is already extremely useful and even before its first 'stable' release people already have used to build large systems used in production.
I think what applies to building other kinds of software applies to designing programming languages too: you need something that you can start using to build real systems as soon as possible and then iterate from there based on your experience.
The problem with languages is that changing the language involves throwing away the code you wrote, which discourages one from building real systems with a language that is still changing.
That puts even more value in keeping languages simple. And tools like gofix are also quite nice to help with this.
Is interesting to contrast his approach building BitC to that of Ken Thompson and Rob Pike (both former colleagues of his at Bell Labs) building Go.
Go has been criticized for "not paying attention to PL research", which might be true, but is already extremely useful and even before its first 'stable' release people already have used to build large systems used in production.
I think what applies to building other kinds of software applies to designing programming languages too: you need something that you can start using to build real systems as soon as possible and then iterate from there based on your experience.
The problem with languages is that changing the language involves throwing away the code you wrote, which discourages one from building real systems with a language that is still changing.
That puts even more value in keeping languages simple. And tools like gofix are also quite nice to help with this.