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Google Engineer Decries Complexity of Java, C++
snydeq writes "Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments. 'I think these languages are too hard to use, too subtle, too intricate. They're far too verbose and their subtlety, intricacy and verbosity seem to be increasing over time. They're oversold, and used far too broadly,' Pike said. 'How do we have stuff like this [get to be] the standard way of computing that is taught in schools and is used in industry? [This sort of programming] is very bureaucratic. Every step must be justified to the compiler.' Pike also spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic typing."
Shorter Rob Pike: all those other languages suck, but the one I invented rocks. It's elegant and simple just like Lisp was back in the sixties!
I'm reminded of this blog post I read, where the author described it as "The Hurricane Lantern Effect". You look at someone else performing a task, and you think "geez, what an idiot! I can do it better in ten different ways!".
Then they hand the task off to you, and you slowly realize that each of your ten improvements isn't actually any better.
I bet you that if it's still around in ten years, someone else will decry Go 10.0 as being a "bureaucratic programming language".
Thank you, I do agree. I was about to write to the authors of Go, but I thought better of it: simply because I cannot see Go go anywhere.
Basically, they do really weird things:
- no exceptions
- half assed immutability concepts
- focus on compile time (compile time? really? yes really!)
- no modularization system (it's like the micro-kernel vs mono-kernel fight all over)
It's got some good ideas that make it interesting for small, fast, secure applications, but not so many that it becomes interesting. I could see technically make some headway for small monolithic kernels. But their market placement is lacking to the point that it is non-existent.
It's why COBOL was invented, with syntax like.
SUBTRACT DEBIT FROM BALANCE GIVING NEWBALANCE.
I kid you not, Adm Hopper actually thought that would make programming easier, and she was no moron.
COBOL was designed like this so it could be read and understood by corporate auditors and accountants - and for the recruitment and training of accountants as COBOL programmers.
It makes perfect sense when you remember that modern bookkeeping rules are the product of hundreds of years of law and practical experience which the neolithic geek did not have.
Nearly everything I was unhappy about in C++ is better in D.
Actually, English is a very easy language to learn, to a certain degree. It's a lot like learning to play guitar. Any moron can learn to play a few chords on a guitar and make a simple song. However, only really talented people can become true virtuosos of the instrument and play like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai. English is like that: it's easy to learn it to a minimal degree and become somewhat conversant. The words are short and simple, you don't have to worry about silly things like word gender, etc. However, becoming truly fluent in it (so that you can read and write advanced literature, for instance) is difficult and time-consuming because you have to memorize so many things, and learning some Greek and Latin is very useful for understanding many larger words.
The main problems of the major languages are known, but not widely recognized by many programmers.
The killer problems with C today mostly involve lying to the language. "int read(int fd, char* buf, size_t bufl);" is a lie; you're telling the compiler that the function accepts the address of a pointer, while in fact it accepts a reference to an array of char of length "bufl". This lie is the root cause of most buffer overflows. The other big problems with C involve the fact that you have to obsess on who owns what, both for allocation and concurrency locking purposes, yet the language provides no help whatsoever in dealing with those issues.
And that's where we are today.