Unpopular opinion: What it means for a language to “have a spec” is so ambiguous as to be meaningless in practice.
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Language specification is a highly specialized, difficult, and *expensive* activity. Few language communities even have the skills to do it; way fewer have the stomach for the investment it takes.
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I would argue that C++'s standard and Standard ML's Definition are closer to a "definition", whereas Go's spec is "documentation". I want the former, not the latter (well I do want the latter, but not as a specification)
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I might be one of those few people that actually care about having a language definition, but personally I really do care -- the fact that OCaml and powershell, two languages I use reasonably often, don't have a definition, often causes me pain.
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Fair enough! But I would say all three are valuable documents for implementers, users, and decision makers. “Have a spec” is meaningless advice, but “have documents of real value” is as important as ever.
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It sucks if you're getting FUD re "not having a spec." Isn't a spec mostly a vehicle to coordinate efforts between language designers, tool & runtime implementors, program analyzers (and probably others I've forgotten)? If those groups feel heard, shouldn't that be enough?
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Whoa. It seems a pretty big, fallacious jump to go from "wildly different goals" to "no meaning in practice". Different meanings != Meaningless. I know that's arguably not the claim but the wording did seem deliberate/tendentious to imply "meaningless". Just calling that out.
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