Your summary seems accurate, but if we are understanding correctly, I don't think what they're attempting is even possible.
The problem is that all the features of a language interact, and scientific experiments try to isolate variables. So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.
If someone can provide an example of evidence-based language design, I'd be interested. But right now I don't really see it.
Why not have an evidence-based car or plane design? Like programming languages, these things are complex enough that they require historical exemplars and rules of thumb. You can't really expect to explore the design space from scratch.
So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.
That's a plausible outcome. It may not be possible to design a best-in-class language without some kind of top-down planning, or even without an auteur like Matz or Hejlsberg managing the vision part. "Benevolent dictators" are also common in large and successful software projects, so maybe there's something to that.
However, it's also possible that relying on formal empiricism for language design will lead to at least a few breakthroughs. It might require another auteur to synthesize them into a great language, but the discovery would still be valuable.
Comments
Your summary seems accurate, but if we are understanding correctly, I don't think what they're attempting is even possible.
The problem is that all the features of a language interact, and scientific experiments try to isolate variables. So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.
If someone can provide an example of evidence-based language design, I'd be interested. But right now I don't really see it.
Why not have an evidence-based car or plane design? Like programming languages, these things are complex enough that they require historical exemplars and rules of thumb. You can't really expect to explore the design space from scratch.
That's a plausible outcome. It may not be possible to design a best-in-class language without some kind of top-down planning, or even without an auteur like Matz or Hejlsberg managing the vision part. "Benevolent dictators" are also common in large and successful software projects, so maybe there's something to that.
However, it's also possible that relying on formal empiricism for language design will lead to at least a few breakthroughs. It might require another auteur to synthesize them into a great language, but the discovery would still be valuable.
Even if the evidence based advancement only helps them iterate reliably towards a local maximum it could still work out really quite well.