Slashdot Mirror
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?
Why doesn't java fit the bill? *blinks*
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
http://srd.yahoo.com/business/publications/softwar e/compilers/languages/whitepaper/itf/2001/november /crossreference/compilers/engineering/top.pdf
...does have those features. Crawl out from under your rock and have a look.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Why object oriented? OO is only one attempted solution to the larger problem of making programming easier on the programmer. It does this by trying to compartmentalize functionality and seperate implementation from usage. 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.
Functional language actually provide even cleaner semantics of encapsulation by first-class method passing; compare the interface semantics of this versus encapsulation and notice how simplier the documentation is. Even OO style is better done in a functional way than objects: calling a function to return a lexically scoped function that can then be passed around does far more to promote security and encapsulation than any OO language could hope to do (look at the ugly attempt of C++ to provide member function pointers). Even the arguably most OO language, smalltalk, does what it needs to do in a very functional way.
Besides functional there is the APL, now J and K, way of doing things. Array languages have shown for years that the most effecient way of operating on data is to slice the data column-wise as opposed to across object: doing an operations on the all first fields of your objects as opposed to doing an all operations on your first object. This even hides the amount of data from you. Perl is just now seeing this with hyper operators.
Instead of desiring OO, peple should look to see what the desired outcome is, then think rationally instead of going with the buzz-word compliant non-technical people.
Congrats! You are now a purveyor and advocate of a minority language. Take a seat beside the COBOL programmers trying to eek a retirement out of the last contract they can land.