Hallo,
On 12/13/06, Claus Reinke
we have had lots of languages that were intended to be well-designed (good, beautiful, ..), but never much used in practice, and we have also had lots of languages that were intended to be pragmatic (practical, useful, ..), without much interest in theoretical beauty. but how many languages are there where the two aspects have converged, with both communities still actively interested in the result?
Lua is a small scripting language created in academia, whose authors are academics, that has reached the industry embedded in several well-known products such as World of Warcraft or Adobe Lightroom (which is 40% Lua). Frequently people ask for bloat in the mailing list, and the usual answer is "why?". The authors claim that when thinking about a new version of Lua they don't think of features to add, but what features they can remove. So I'd say it's perfectly possible to have an academia-backed language useful for the "real world". Cheers, -- -alex http://www.ventonegro.org/