What I Hate About Your Programming Language

chromatic writes "Perl programmers like punctuation. Python programmers like indentation. Every programming language has its own syntax, stemming from its philosophy. What I Hate About Your Programming Language examines the issues that shape languages as they grow. It's not advocacy, I promise."

Comments

ummm..

[Pfhreakaz0id]

ASP isn't a language. You can use any number of scripting languages with it. Of course, most are done in VBScript, but many folks use JScript (javascript), because it is what they use for the client side script.

Re:Pretty limited scope

[chromatic]

I didn't list specific gripes about the languages you describe because I don't really have enough practical experience with them to analyze them well. I do discuss languages such as Lisp and Smalltalk in the analysis section though, just as you mention.

Just to be fair, though, one of my gripes with Lisp is the idea that reducing all syntax to a Lambda form makes up for moving all the remaining complexity to built-ins and extensions. I certainly don't think in trees -- a little syntactic sugar is tasty. That doesn't make Lisp wrong; it just doesn't fit my brain as well.

Re:Pretty limited scope

[NetSettler]

I looked at this article, and I was disappointed by what a limited set of languages chromatic had examined.

Given the superficial and haphazard nature of the review, I was just as glad it didn't touch on those other languages. I really didn't get much of value out of the article and the only thing that would have been worse is an equally superficial treatment of my own languages of choice.

And anyway, one person's opinion is just one person's opinion. It's a pity the author didn't attempt to do any kind of survey. Even an unscientific survey might have been more interesting and/or informative than this was. In its present form, there's no way to detect hints of incompleteness, idiosyncracy, bias, ... other than to incompletely, idiosyncratically, and in biased form say "well, here's something I noticed that I disagree with".

I'm sorry if these remarks sound critical, but the entire article came across to me as flamebait and I'm not sure what positive quality I can draw from it. It started off as a nice idea--that language philophy can influence syntax or vice versa. But it diverged about halfway through from that to random, unmotivated jabs at this and that language and really ended up going nowhere with few, if any, useful takehome messages.

Maybe I was also put off by the fact that the author's statement, that "Lisp is very much the lambda calculus". As a matter of history, several decades ago, it might have been reasonable to say that Lisp was "inspired by" ideas of the language calculus (though some might say "misunderstandings of the lambda calculus"), but the language was a whole is really enormously different than that now. It is often used as a teaching vehicle for esoteric things like the lambda calculus because other languages can't stretch that far, but mainstream Lisp does not look or feel much at all like the lambda calculus, any more than "modern music is very much that of Elvis Presley", however much his break from the past may have been a founding influence on modern music. This failed allusion injured the author's credibility with me within the article almost irreparably.

Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong

[avdi]

C++ suffers from some early bad design decisions. Templates came late. Strostrup knew about templates, and decided not to put them in. This led to great pain and ugly code, templates went in, and it's taken a decade to clean up that mess.

Bjarne wanted to put generics in from the very beginning.

Java was supposed to clean this all up, but now Java is getting generics, which it wasn't supposed to need. So it's going down the same path as C++, but with a new set of mistakes.

Java "cleans up" nothing, it simply strips out all the more powerful features of C and C++ which novices tend to stub their toes on. Oh, and it adds one important feature: inner classes. Unfortunately the result is a language whose omitions actually make it more verbose and harder to maintain than C++.

Other attempts to fix C include Objective C (which still has a following) "C+@" (a Bell Labs product that predates Java), "C#", a Microsoft variant, and several others with tiny market share such as "D". None are enormously better than C.

Neither ObjC nor C# is an attempt to "fix" C; Objective C is an attempt to embed a Smalltalk object system in C, and C# is an attempt to fix Java. Neither of them are applicable to the same problem domains as C.

I'd like to see C++ cleaned up, but the ANSI committee is more interested in putting in obscure features for template writers.

Everything in C++ belongs there, and most of it was intended to go in from a very early stage. The only thing that needs to be "cleaned up" is the C preprocessor. Templates could use easier syntax but no one has come up with anything signifigantly better than the current syntax.

Re:He likes JavaScript???

[Molt]

I think you'll find this guy does know how to program.
As well as being well-respected within the Perl community (And possibly other languages too) he's the O'Reilly technical editor, the author of their "Extreme Programming Guide" and the chief author of "Writing Weblogs in Slash".
I have a feeling I may well have just been trolled, but I thought it worth dropping this here so people at least knew that this guy was not some random schoolkid knocking out half-formed opinionating.
My advice: Do a little research before posting