> Picking some features while leaving others out is something that every language does; if doing that is enough to make a language "revolutionary", then every language is revolutionary.
Picking a set of well motivated and orthogonal features that combine well in flexible ways is definitely enough to be revolutionary if that combination permits expressive programming in ways that used to be unwieldy, error-prone or redundant, eg. "redundant" in the sense that you have multiple ways of expressing the same thing in overlapping but possibly incompatible ways. It doesn't follow that every language must be revolutionary just because they pick features too, there are conditions to qualify.
For systems programming, I think Zig is revolutionary. I don't think any other language matches Zig's cross-compilation, cross-platform and metaprogramming story in such a simple package. And I don't even use Zig, I'm just a programming language theory enthusiast.
> I agree with Walter: Zig isn't doing anything novel.
"Novel" is relative. Anyone familiar with MetaOCaml wouldn't have seen Zig as particularly novel in a theoretical sense, as comptime is effectively a restricted multistage language. It's definitely revolutionary for an industry language though. I think D has too much baggage to qualify, even if many Zig expressions have translations into D.
Picking a set of well motivated and orthogonal features that combine well in flexible ways is definitely enough to be revolutionary if that combination permits expressive programming in ways that used to be unwieldy, error-prone or redundant, eg. "redundant" in the sense that you have multiple ways of expressing the same thing in overlapping but possibly incompatible ways. It doesn't follow that every language must be revolutionary just because they pick features too, there are conditions to qualify.
For systems programming, I think Zig is revolutionary. I don't think any other language matches Zig's cross-compilation, cross-platform and metaprogramming story in such a simple package. And I don't even use Zig, I'm just a programming language theory enthusiast.
> I agree with Walter: Zig isn't doing anything novel.
"Novel" is relative. Anyone familiar with MetaOCaml wouldn't have seen Zig as particularly novel in a theoretical sense, as comptime is effectively a restricted multistage language. It's definitely revolutionary for an industry language though. I think D has too much baggage to qualify, even if many Zig expressions have translations into D.