What makes (open) Dylan distinct from other programming languages? [closed]

Question

Nowadays there are so many programming languages out there: functional, object oriented, dynamically or statically typed, or mixes of these characteristics.

Recently I noticed this release: http://opendylan.org/news/2011/12/10/new_release.html

Open Dylan.

Why would it be interesting for people to learn this programming language, if there is already Clojure, Python, Java, Scala, C#, Common Lisp, Scheme with arguably larger, more vital communities and more libraries surrounding them?

I hope this post will not be closed as being "too subjective", I'm just interested in what makes Dylan distinct from all these other programming languages!

Answer 1

There are several-questions-in-one here.

What is Dylan? Do read its Wikipedia page, it's a good start. The uniqueness of Dylan is that it's a Lisp, without the Lispy syntax. This was appealing to some people when Dylan was first defined. Moreover, Dylan has achieved a pretty functional macro system (which is arguably one of the strongest pros of Lisp) without the Lisp syntax.

Why is Dylan interesting today? Well, it's just another programming language, and a pretty old one at that. It was designed back in the early 90s, so many newer languages exist. But if one loves the Lisp way minus the syntax, Dylan is probably the leading choice.

What is Dylan interesting to you? This is a subjective question, which depends on you a lot. What are your interests? What are your goals? What are the current tools you're using, and are you not satisfied with them?

Answer 2

They real cool thing about dylan is its objectsystem. Common Lisp has an objectsystem called CLOS (common lisp object system) and it basically is the nonplus ultra of all objectsystems, but CL has the problem that it's kind of mmhh well kind of an unclean design. The Dylan people wanted all the power of CLOS but in a clean new design.

The main thing which is special is that you do everything with multimethods which are outside of the objects. It's really awesome but the benefits are kind of hard to see in the beginning.

The other thing is that dylan has a macrosystem, which works pretty ok. I have not seen a better macrosystem for a language with syntax.

All in all dylan is a really awesome language, it just had a lot of bad luck. Everybody should try to learn some dylan, it's a language with a lot to teach. The OpenDylan People inherited a shitload of code (compiler and libraries ...) and they are working on making it production-ready.