Every once in a while, I go back and reread the Reddit thread where they were first talking about Smile. Each time I read it, it’s a reminder of what I’m up against. There are a lot of interesting notions about what’s good in a programming language; everybody has their own pet feature: It has to be as fast as C! It has to allow infinite threads! It has to be 100% type-safe! It has to be type-inferring! It has to be designed for building web services! Did you see how X implemented generics!? And you’d better not leave out Intellisense!!!
It reminds me of back in the ’90s when I worked with this lady who was convinced that client-server would take over the world — by which she meant custom apps running on PCs talking to mainframes. Our worldviews and past experiences skew our expectations toward what we want, and the future often doesn’t play out the way we hope or expect.
(This is gonna be a long post, and I’m going to talk a lot about Smile, including some philosophy and history, a deep-dive into the core syntax, and a bunch of additional examples at the end. I feel like writing a bit on one of my favorite topics. Don’t feel obligated to read the whole thing.)
