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Chris Double
on 12 Jan 2000
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The things I like most about Dylan would probably be:
- its lisp like nature.
- everything is an object.
- multiple dispatch
- singleton, subclass, one-of dispatch.
- macro facility.
- ability to use OO, functional or procedural programming.
- DUIM, so easy to create GUI's in code rather than requiring a GUI builder.
- The HD development environments ship with lots of example code.
I do miss the listener style approach you get in Lisp, where you see the results
of what
you do straight away - similar type of functionality in Smalltalk too. HD 1.2 provides this
from the IDE though and HD 2.0 beta makes it even easier so it's not such a loss.
Overall it is a language that seems to suit the style of programming that I do. The
use
of multiple dispatch simplifies many designs I've had to do and the macro faciltiy helps
to simplify things even further. The ability to pass methods, functions, and classes
around as first class objects also has made things easier for the types of things I do.
Many of the above things can be done in other languages in a varity of different ways.
But for me Dylan has provided a good trade off between ease of use, powerfull language
features, and easy application delivery.
I've used HD 1.2 professional for most of my recent personal programming projects,
one
commercial program and a couple of small freeware programs available for download
from the internet.
That's my reasons for using Dylan. I'm sure an enthusiast of any language could come
up with similar reasons though. Pick a language and I hope you have fun using it.
Chris.
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