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What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?
A not-so Anonymous Coward queries: "My company is about to start development on a new project, and I have to decide on a language and development environment. My boss gave me a set of criteria which needs to be filled: intuitive and easy to use IDE; simplified GUI design and event handling; advanced error handling; advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection; full support for operator and function overloading; and portable (at compile-time) across various platforms. I have already looked at C++, Java, C++, C#, Eiffel, and even VB.net; I may be missing something but as far as I can tell all of these languages are missing something from this list. Is there a language available that has all of these features? I thought that someone from Slashdot would be able to point me in the right direction?" If you were to design a language from the ground up, what features would you include and why?
1. Its what "everyone else" is perceived to be using,
2. Programming cannot be suitably be turned into a MacJob until the variance in the toolset is reduced.
Microsoft's .Net and Java are going to occupy 70% of the brainspace for programming in the next ten years, and these languages conform to my description above.
Sure, Lisp is cool - its also dead in the market, so stop trying to resurrect it based on its coolness. No one cares.
Unless you have pretty strong performance requirements, Java is your language.
I think it fills all the requrements, except for the somewhat misplaced "full support for operator and function overloading".
Why operator overloading would be a mission critical feature for a language beats me. It was excluded from Java for a reason! I assume the reason is how hopelessly confusing it can be to read code where + or && doesn't do what you'd expect them to do. It should be clear when a function is called and when it's not.
Objective C and the Cocoa framework provided with Mac OSX is quite possibly the most powerful API I have ever encountered. You can also use Java with Cocoa is you don't want to learn some weird syntax, but I'd reccomend sticking with Objective C since it provides some small and useful benefits over Java.
Also, all the development tools come free with the operating system(OS X). Project Builder and Interface builder are first rate development tools. WebObjects(not free. 700 bucks) also provides a great medium towards database driven web based applications.
Obviously this depends on whether or not you want to limit yourself to OS X. Who knows, maybe they'll port OS X to x86 =).
-Jacques
jc@cs.washington.edu
For instance, if you're looking at languages and find that you like what C++ has to offer but you need garbage collection it can sometimes be reasonable to write a memory manager which takes care of that for you. If programming resources are an issue, or if writing a memory manager is just too daunting (no shame there, that's a tough problem) there are third party memory managers available in the world.
This is true for at least some of the other features you listed as well. The language doesn't have to do everything natively, you just have to be able to get it done somehow.
Also, some things that might be missing are really there, just with different names. For instance, multiple inheritence may not exist in java, but it does have interfaces, which sure a very, very similar purpose. Just because it's not multiple inheritance doesn't me it won't meet your needs.
Ultimately it sounds to me like you boss has heard too many buzzwords recently. It might be helpful to ask him why he chose to put each of those requirements on the list. Knowing what needs to be accomplished rather than how he thinks it should be accomplished might just help you find a solution which will actually meet all the needs of the project.
Behold the Power of Cheese!
This has to be the dumbest, most trollerific Ask Slashdot ever. What's next? 'Which operating system is best?' 'What's the best text editor?' 'Is Bill Gates Cooler, As Cool or Less Cool than Linus?' .... They must be having a really slow news day there over at OSDN.
- undoware.ca
You can have all those features and many more if you use a commercial Lisp implementation (the free ones have no decent IDE or GUI yet).
If you have a serious budget, take a look at Allegro Common Lisp. The other choice would be LispWorks, which is a little cheaper and without run-time fees.
They both have an excellent IDE and come with Interface Builders using CLIM, meaning your apps run under Windows, Macintosh and Unix (Motif) without a big hassle using native widgets.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
These requirements are terrible. Requirements should not specify implementation details. While abstractly saying things like Object Oriented Design with good GUI tools that supports event handling and good error or exception handling is fine, saying we HAVE to be able to have ths syntax: object1 + object2 is ridiculous.
1) Advanced OO design.
Ok, I can understand wanting OOD/OO Programming constructs explicitly supported. Abstract classes (and/or) interfaces and inheritance, etc. are all good OO constructs. But REQUIRING multiple-inheritance? Why? There are many good OO languages that don't do multiple inheritence. And GC has nothing to do with OO - while it might be a good criterion on its own.
2) Operator overloading.
This is such a crock. Is there anything that can not be accomplished without Operator Overloading? There are many arguments against using operator overloading in fact even in languages that support it. (Non-intuitive nature of it sometimes, the failure to implement all operators including comparisons, etc.)
If you take out the 2 dumb requirements above, you open the door to all kinds of languages:
Java, Python, Smalltalk, etc.
Then you can truly evaluate them on the availble RADs for the language, performance and suitability to the end project requirements.
Fire your boss!
> All those features used together is going to make a big mess, IMHO. I think your boss needs some education in computer science.
Mark me -1, Redundant on the many comments already posted about the symptoms of PHB syndrome.
> Operator overloading is not a good idea I think.
IMO, operator overloading is wonderful: define a type for vectors, matrices, etc., and overload the arithmetic operators for them. I've even done it for (simulated) robot sensor scans, and for the ">" sign in a system that uses simulated annealing.
Overloading can make your code much more mathematically intuitive, and hence easier to read.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hi,
do yourself a favour and take a look at
Objective C and the typical Frameworks
like Openstep or even more recent Cocoa.
As a converted Linux, now Mac User I recently
discovered those goodies and I really don't
understand why they didn't take off in the past
(NextStep has been around since the 80ies).
Objective C is such a powerful dynamic language
and it is real fun to write programs with it.
You have a clean and lean Smalltalk-in-C object
oriented syntax and are able to use all those
low-level C APIs... I don't know any better.
PS: For the use with Windows try to get one
of the OpenStep 4.2 packages one often find
at ebay. Besides the native Next/Sun/i386
OpenStep OSes it includes a devkit for
the use under WinNT... If use ever had to
use COM and alike, you will really, really love
OpenStep....
PS: There is even a GNU implementation of the
OpenStep API... -> GNUStep
Pointers:
http://www.stepwise.com
http://www.gnustep.org
As the original post mentioned, be careful you're not just "sitting around discussing the language without discussing the problem." As you just demonstrated, even design has its buzzwords. No one methodology is ideal for solving all problems. Choose the best tool for the task, and this includes methodology.
Beware of just abstracting the language debate to a higher level.
Aren't these the exact goals of Kylix? I haven't used it myself, but from what I've seen it is an intuitive programming language suitable for general application development, with a nice GUI system.
-John
Say you have: ComplexNumber a, b, c, d, e, f;
. add(b)))))
Would you rather have:
((a^b+e)/c*(d+b+a+b)
Or
(a.power(b.add(e)).divby(c.multiply(d.add(b.add(a
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And a good sign of it being an emotional topic is that almost all of the posts are below my viewing threshold. Far more than normal.
Here's my take: I used to be one of the biggest Java advocates around. (In fact, I was one of the winner's of Sun's Java Cup programming contest.) I fought off learning Perl for years, but today, my language of preference is now Perl. Here's why:
- Portability - Where Sun brags about "write one, run everywhere", Perl actually delivers. Java's available on a few platforms (and even fewer, supported by Sun). But Perl has *much* wider availability. As one example of many, FreeBSD didn't have a reliable, supported Java implementation until very recently (if even now), whereas Perl has been there for ages. And somewhat disturbing is that the most reliable Java implmentation is on Sparc Solaris. Even I386 Solaris has serious issues. I guess making sure you fix problems on your own platform is a natural tendency, but it does go against the reliable portability that Java promised. (As compared to MS's anti-competitive behaviour, this is small stuff, but an issue nonetheless.)
- Reliability - I've had JVM's cransh on me, run out of memory inappropriately, and have other ugly problems. I haven't seen this with perl, yet. I've looked to IBM, Sun, Symantec, TowerJ, and others, for a solid, fast JVM, and they all seem to have fatal weaknesses.
- Consistency - I've found far greater consistentcy in the behaviour, performance, and reliability of Perl across platforms, than Java. I've seen Java seriously choke under pressure, and run out of memory. It might be fine for lightweight, run-once applications. But for heavy-duty stuff, it's repeatedly disappointed me.
- String Manipulation - In the majority of applications I've come across, *especially* web application, most of the work you end up doing is string parsing and manipulation. Perl's regular expression functions far outshine Java in this aspect. A one liner replaces a fifty-liner. Yes, the person maintaining the code has to know Perl regular expressions inside out, but I don't have a problem with that requirement.
- API's - CPAN seems to have far more exhaustive support for standard API's, well in advance of Sun's. They are usually more fragmented initially, and I would prefer the centralized approach of Sun, if it could just keep up. But it can't (or at least doesn't).
- Open Source - While Sun talks a lot about being open source advocates, Java's source is far more restrictive and harder to get or legally use, than Perl's. (Although I am against the non-commercial restriction of GPL. Hmmm, Perl is GPL, isn't it? Have to check that, as I'm not 100% sure, but it's a good guess.)
- GUI - AWT was efficient, but hard to use. Swing is very cool looking, with great features, but *slow*. Perl/TK is fast, efficient, portable, easy to use. It's by far my preferred rapid GUI environment. (A bit of foreshadowing perhaps: On my winning JavaOne entry, I used PackerLayout [I think], which was a port of the Tk layout mechanism to Java. Okay, okay, packer actually originated with Tk, not Perl, but since Perl/Tk is more or less the defacto Perl GUI, it's not complete out of context
:-)
- Multithreading - This is actually one point where Java shines over Perl. Perl has no standard multithreading, which truly, truly, sucks.
- Elegance - This is another area where Perl fails, but another area where it doesn't matter
:-) Perl is ugly, Java is elegant and beautiful to look at. But I can do more with perl, more quickly. And super-efficient hashes as a core part of the langauge allow passing arguments as key-value types, as is encouraged in their object programming model. This, I find more elegant. So at the surface, Java is prettier. But one layer down, where it really counts, Pelr is more elegant.
So in short, I've "been there, done that" with Java. Perl is liberating me from a lot of the problems I had with Java.(And on a rather irrelevant, but rather appropriate bit of symbolism: I happened to be wearing a JavaOne Long Sleeved T-Shirt tonight as I wrote this. The wrists were a bit tight, shrunk from washing, I guess, so I tugged on them to loosen them a bit. The whole sleeve ripped. Kind of symbolizes my experiences with java. Shoddy merchandise, all around
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Amen, brother
The worst are casting operators, such as "operator const char*()", that can really lead to bizarre code and hard-to-catch errors because if your finger slips on the keyboard while entering an operator, you will all of a sudden vastly change the semantics of your code while the syntax, at a glance, appears the same. And who outside of the secret, special cadre of C++ gurus can fully predict the results when you have a combination of casting operator overloading and method overloading on a call? I end up explicitly casting objects such as _bstr_t that misuse this behavior and do not provide an alternative named method to avoid confusion in my code.
The totally weirdest is, of course, in STL, where they have the function operator such as "result_type operator()(const argument_type& y) const;" where for object foo you would call "foo(argument_type_obj)", and the object reference behaves like a function pointer. This can create some really cool algorithmic constructs like a "for each" in C++, at the mere expense of zapping your noodle with pyschodelic hippie mind rays.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
In both of these examples, reference counted memory models just don't make sense. In the case of the doubly linked list, the obvious ownership strategy is for the list to own its nodes. The nodes should not own other nodes. In the observer pattern example, one approach would be for the observer to own everything. This approach makes sense since the observer sees everything.
C++ allows you to choose a memory management model that fits the problem domain. In some cases, reference counting is a terrible model. GUI programming is a great example of where it would be a bad model (which is why Qt uses a tree based memory management strategy)
OO is only one attempted solution to the larger problem of making programming easier on the programmer.
No. You're thinking of MSVC++ and drag and drop programming. OO is about modeling and it can be very effective.
It does this by trying to compartmentalize functionality and seperate implementation from usage.
This is the stuff trolls are made of Jayson. OO does not "compartmentalize" and it is not about contract programming. You have a very superficial understanding of OO principles.
Each instance of an object in a program is a model. You think about what it is conceptually that you are modeling and derive classes for those concepts. In practice these objects usually have hierarchial and recursive relationships. For example a stock is a security but a security is not a stock because it could be a fund. Or a WWW document has elements and frames where frames may be sub documents. These relationships are found everywhere and can be modeled most effectively using OO priciples. That's not to say you should use OO for everything (e.g. you wouldn't want to represent each character in a document using a separate object). Indeed I don't beleive 9 out of 10 developers using an OO language are actually writing OO code. It's modular at best. To use it effectively is non-trivial.
To see how OO has eschewed its own features just look at how delegation is favored over inheritance. This is a functional way of programming.
Like I was saying above, the results of OO are most effective when used strategically. The highest level superstructure benifits greatly from an OO organization. But using OO to a fine degree is not necesarily good.
All serious next-gen GUI platforms are Unicode now. If you're not using C++ for other reasons, don't pick a language that isn't fundamentally Unicode-based if your goal is GUI apps.
Ruby is like Perl. It's for parsing and filtering byte streams, and like Perl it's great for that sort of app.
Such languages are not ideal for interactive GUI apps that are all about visual display and interaction. Go for Java or C# or VB.Net or C++/KDE and forget the MI or overloading nonsense. That's not how you pick a language.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."