– Emphasize that this is a language designed to take advantage of the revolution in the internet/open source. Before the widespread adoption of the internet (through the web), libraries were hard to get a hold of. Now, it’s as easy as “gem install” (or whatever the equivalent is in the Java world: maven? Ivy?)

This is a fundamental change in how to approach things: if a big company that is the steward of your language comes out with a library that’s verbose and cumbersome (EJB 2), the community has the option to create their own (Hibernate). The same has not been true of the language (e.g. Java). Mother hopes to make it so, but letting libraries extend the language.

You can talk about one of the great innovations of C: putting I/O in the library, rather than in the language itself.

This also allows breaking changes, because no one is forced to change: Hibernate is incompatible with EJB 2, but no one is forced to use Hibernate over EJB, at least until so few people are using EJB that it’s no longer supported. And EJB 3 helps people with legacy EJB 2 move to a more Hibernate-like model.

Back to The Mother Programming Language.