What Makes a Powerful Programming Language?

Posted by Cliff on Monday February 11, 2002 @09:30AM from the blueprints-for-next-generation-computing dept.

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 of 1,098 comments (clear)

This is the WORST of all possible options. by Ars-Fartsica · 2002-02-11 17:41 · Score: 2, Troll

Sure! Immerse yourself in a dying, idiosyncratic language that has little support, few examples of outstanding commercial successes, and a tiny support community. Spend months relearning everything you know about CS theory just so you can implement quicksort in two lines less than you would have in language X.
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.