> How did toy languages start getting used for serious work?
Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
I think the problem is the legacy Unix-style concept of shared libraries and how anything touching native code is deeply intertwined with the OS itself.
Funny thing: I never liked shared libraries. There is something fundamental about them that is broken: it changes the execution context from the one that you had when you were testing your code prior to shipping. The space savings argument only made sense for a little while, what they should have done instead is build a much better linker that only includes the smallest subset of code that your program should have access to. That as well as a predefined set of file system bits which system calls you are allowed to make and which you are not.
How did that happen? How did toy languages start getting used for serious work?
I can understand JS to an extent because of first class functions, but Lua is like a better, properly designed JS and also has them.
> How did toy languages start getting used for serious work?
Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
So they just got there first?
Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
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I think the problem is the legacy Unix-style concept of shared libraries and how anything touching native code is deeply intertwined with the OS itself.
Funny thing: I never liked shared libraries. There is something fundamental about them that is broken: it changes the execution context from the one that you had when you were testing your code prior to shipping. The space savings argument only made sense for a little while, what they should have done instead is build a much better linker that only includes the smallest subset of code that your program should have access to. That as well as a predefined set of file system bits which system calls you are allowed to make and which you are not.