Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Mojo is a much better "Objective-C without the C" than Swift ever was

One of the primary things that people don't understand about Objective-C is that it is a solution of the two language problem, or more precisely a generalisation of the two language problem to the scripted component pattern.

The scripted component pattern itself is a (common) solution to the problem, first identified in the 70s that programming-in-the-large is not the same as programming-in-the-small, that module implementation languages are not necessarily suitable as module interconnection languages.

And so we have all sorts of flexible connection languages, often interpreted (aka glue, scripting, and orchestration languages), starting with the Unix shell, in addition to fast, compiled component languages such as C, C++ and Rust, and a system will usually incorporate at least one of each kind.

But then you run into the two language problem: you have to deal with these two distinct languages, with how they integrate, and with the boundaries of the integration often not matching up very well with the boundaries of the problem you're trying to solve.

Objective-C solved the two language problem by just jamming the two languages into one: Smalltalk for the scripting/integration and C for the component language. Interoperability is smooth and at the statement level, thougha there is some friction due to overlaps caused by integrating two existing languages that were not designed to be integrated.

Mojo essentially uses the Objective-C approach of jamming the two languages into one. Except it doesn't repeat Objective-C's mistake of using the component language as the base (which, inexplicably, Swift didn't just repeat, but actually doubled down on by largely deprecating objects). The reason this is a mistake is that it turns out that the connection language is actually the more general one, the component language is a specialisation of the connection language.

With this realisation, Mojo's approach of making the connection language the base language make sense. In addition, the fact that the component language is a specialisation also means that you don't actually need to jam a full second language into your base, a few syntactic markers to to indicate the specialisations are sufficient.

This is pretty much exactly stage 2 of the 4 stages of Objective-S, so I think they are using exactly the right approach for this. Except of course for the use of Python as the base instead of Smalltalk, which is a pragmatic choice given what they are trying to accomplish, but means your connection language is unduly limited.

Objective-S has the same basic structure, but with a much more capable connection language as the base.

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