[cap-talk] Security and languages talk

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

Matej Kosik wrote:
> Ivan Krstić napísal:
[...]
>> The Boston Lisp folks invited me to give the talk[1] on May 27th, so  
>> the audience is a fairly clueful programming crowd without any  
>> necessary prior exposure to language security and capability ideas.  
>> I'll be talking for 25 minutes: covering the basic ideas and looking  
>> briefly at things like E, Joe-E, Caja and CaPerl.
> 
> Most (all?) object-capability languages are at present in a deadlock. They will be used when they
> become useful and they will be useful when they become used (because people will find (and fix?)
> bugs, contribute with libraries, create awsome programs that will attract other developers. How to
> break this deadlock is an interesting question.

This is nothing specific to object-capability languages; it applies to
all programming languages. Nevertheless some languages gain popularity.
Absent spending a huge amount of money on marketing, there is no specific
recipe for making a language popular. (I am not very persuaded by the idea
of a "killer app" as such a recipe; there are many languages that achieved
popularity without such an application, and there are many "killer apps"
that have had no significant influence in favour of the language they were
written in.)

However, it seems likely that the more languages representing a particular
approach such as object capabilities, but taking slightly different
approaches to marketing, compatibility, etc., the more likely it is that
one or more will succeed. I used to worry that this would split effort
between several languages that might have been focussed on one, but that
seems to be outweighed by other factors.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood