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Favorite Programming Language Features?
johnnyb asks: "I'm curious what everyone's favorite programming language features are. I'm looking for both the general and the specific. I'm especially looking for features that few people know about or use, but are really useful for those who do know about them. What are your favorite programming language features?"
"A couple of examples to kick off the conversation:
- Continuations
Continuations are very interesting, because they can be used to implement a number of flow-control features such as exceptions, coroutines, cooperative multithreading, and are better at modelling web interactions. This is a more general feature, but most people use these in conjunction with either scheme or ML.
- Tuple-returning
It is a huuuuge time-saver when languages like Perl allow functions to return tuples. Instructions like '($a, $b, $c) = $sth->fetchrow_array()' is a wonderful thing.
- The flip-flop operator [Perl's '..' operator]
Another perlism that I just think is cool. Read more about it here.
So then the perfect language is one where all the real programmers have done all the work for you, and you're just a little script monkey.
... I notice that capable men are still at a premium in our society; we still need the man who is intelligent enough to think of the proper question to ask." (The Evitable Conflict, can be found in I, Robot or other collections)
To that I answer by quoting Dijkstra: "if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger." (EWD1036, page 11)
And so for example even your 10-line, 40-token launcher is too long; its information content can be expressed succintly as "new Webserver(80)" or even "Webserver 80" in any properly designed language.
When electronic calculators came out, accountants did not say "the calculators do all the arithmetic for you, and you are not a real accountant" (or did they?) Similarly for spreadsheet. The reality is, each time they are relieved of a chore, they find a more worthwhile thing to spend their time on, such as analysing various what-if scenerios, which had been intractible until the advent of spreadsheets --- a fine programming language in its own right. I now quote Asimov on the general idea: "The Machines are only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested.