[nem-en] Re: Scala: what you say about it?

[Kamil Skalski]

> > - usability of Nemerle macros in multi-language, large projects - in
> > my currently developed application I have a Nemerle library + some
> > macros and GUI client in C#.
>
> I hope it will be possible to design some GUI in WinForms designer (maybe even
> XAML) and get Nemerle code soon (I'm working on it).

Yeah, when I created new Windows Forms project in VS integration and
opened Designer... VS just vanished ;)

>
> > But, as I am
> > thinking mainly about the compiler API design, not the general
> > concepts of our macro system, it still seems fixable in future for
> > Nemerle.
>
> And what's your vision on the future of Nemerle?
>

Well, as you probably noticed our support for implementing features
and fixing bugs is not very fast. We are surely not abandoning the
project any time soon (maybe if there is an equivalent language with
type inference, pattern matching and macros, but with support from big
company/community, I don't know C# 5.0 ?).
I think that with current feature set of Nemerle we are already in a
reasonably stable position - language has most of the useful built in
stuff already there and with macros the limits for extensibility are
quite far from us. :-)
I would estimate Nemerle as being ahead from current mainstream
languages for about 5-6 years, at least in the coolest features.

I think that now there comes the time for stabilizing the language
itself and focus on:
- fixing bugs
- improvements in compiler / macros API
- improvements in performance
- and of course your great Integration project

Getting forward in this field + maybe also some improvements in
documentation / tutorials is in my opinion a good road-map for
Nemerle.
The problem is that I and Michal do not have much time for doing this,
considering that (especially for Michal ;)) it is not very
"interesting" stuff to do... Seeing all your recent commitments to the
project is very building for me and I think this is the way to go - we
must widen the community of people ready to get involved in the core
of the project and to give a good critic opinions about our current
(often flawed) design.
And I think that getting more people to work with Nemerle requires all
those refactorings to happen - writing macros must not be hard for
reasonably good programmer.

So, the conclusion is:
- Nemerle is a very good and useful language at the moment and I don't
mind using it as replacement for C#/Java for a long time
- Nemerle has great potential, which I think is getting larger not
smaller all the time
- as Michal mentioned, Nemerle did not "catch up" very well yet,
probably because of the current trends in computer science, maybe
because of some of our controversial design decisions (keeping close
to ML languages and insisting on static typing), but as those
decisions drived us to create this language and are *good* in our
opinion it is not something to be ashame of
- the future of Nemerle is defined by the community, we will have the
language / platform, which we will develop all together

-- 
Kamil Skalski
http://nazgul.omega.pl