[mercury-users] Mercury in the Mainstream.

[Tyson Dowd]

On 10-Sep-1998, Randall Helzerman <rahelzer at ichips.intel.com> wrote:
> > 	Logic programming in general, and Mercury in particular, are not 
> >       going to become mainstream languages until it is shown that they 
> >       can be used to create an operating system.
> > 	
> > Just how many operating systems are written in COBOL?  Or BASIC?  Or Perl?
> > How many *available* operating systems are written in Java?
> 
> These are all dying programming languages, with the notable exception of perl.

I think I would be happy if Mercury was dying in as many places
(including many new projects) as COBOL ;-)

To be fair, Randall did say "can be used" rather than used.
I agree that if shown that it is possible to create an operating system,
Mercury gain a great deal of mainstream credibility.  And it is a
good test that the external interfaces of Mercury are sufficiently
expressive to deal with real world tasks.

As a side note, we are working on (what we believe) is a good way
for Mercury to gain some mainstream usage -- a CORBA binding for
Mercury.  This would allow using Mercury to write components,
and so be adopted piecemeal, in an experimental fashion, rather
than demanding the whole job be done in Mercury (such as the
"but can you write an OS" approach).

-- 
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.     - Benjamin Franklin

Tyson Dowd   <tyson at tyse.net>   http://tyse.net