Comment by smallstepforman
8 hours ago
In 1979, the industry needed ‘C with Classes’. It did not need whatever is required today. Hence the only viable path is the one we’re on. Counter point - who is using Pony (the programming language) today? No one.
7 years ago, my graduate distributed systems professor required everyone to complete his projects in Elixir because it was trending on HN. It was my first functional language and after getting over the initial hump I fell in love with it.
Now, I’m teaching undergraduate courses of my own and, while I do not have the flexibility to change the languages used in my current offerings, if I ever start teaching a systems programming course I will absolutely require the students to use Pony.
Curious as to why you chose Pony as the language to use for your none used language. Any specific reason or was it just the first one that you thought of that fit the sentence?
I’m not sure if Pony is still being used, but the language was making some headway, at least on the PLT side of things. I know the inclusion of some of their reference capabilities work (and practical implementation of prior research in the area) would be a benefit to greenfield programming language design. I think they missed going the process calculus route, instead choosing actors, but overall I liked the direction.