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New Programming Languages Come From Designers
eldavojohn writes "A very lengthy and somewhat meandering essay from Crista Videira Lopes has sparked off some discussion of where new programming languages come from. She's writing from the viewpoint of academia, under the premise that new languages don't come from academia. And they've been steadily progressing outside of large companies (with the exception of Java and .NET) into the bedrooms and hobbies of people she identifies as 'designers' or 'lone programmers' instead of groups of 'researchers.' Examples include PHP by Rasmus Lerdorf, JavaScript by Brenden Eich, Python by Guido van Rossum and — of course — Ruby by Yukihiro Matsumoto. The author notes that, as we escape our computational and memory bounds that once plagued programming languages in the past and marred them with ultra efficient syntax in the name of hardware, our new languages are coming from designers with seemingly little worry about the budget CPU being able to handle a large project in the new language. The piece is littered with interesting assertions like 'one striking commonality in all modern programming languages, especially the popular ones, is how little innovation there is in them!' and 'We require scientific evidence for the claimed value of experimental drugs. Should we require scientific evidence for the value of experimental software?' Is she right? Is the answer to studying modern programming languages to quantify their design as she attempts in this post? Given the response of Slashdot to Google's Dart it would appear that something is indeed missing in coercing developers that a modern language has valid offerings worthy of their time."
Aren't the basic programming concepts understood and defined now? All a new language can really bring to the table is a different syntax.
If you really believe this, then you've been stuck in Algol-derivative land for far too long.
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When someone designs a programming language to solve a problem that they have, they are designing a programming language that will likely solve the problems of a lot of other people (unless you have particularly esoteric problems).
Matz has said that he built Ruby because he wanted a scripting language more powerful than Perl but more object oriented than Python. He solved his own need and that coincided with the needs of other people, making it a popular language.
Design-by-committee languages tend to feel like they've taken a blind guess at what problems need to be solved without consulting the people experiencing those problems.
It's also worth remembering that performance doesn't mean the same as it used to. An Erlang program, for example, typically runs at about a tenth the speed of a C program doing the same thing... when you have one core. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to write Erlang programs that scale up to 1024 processors (I've written Erlang code that, without any special effort, scaled almost linearly when moved from my single-core laptop to a 64-processor SGI machine and the profiling data indicated that the load was still pretty evenly distributed between Erlang processes so going to 512 or more CPUs would have been easy). When even mobile phones are multicore, this matters a lot more than single-threaded performance. There are lots of things in C that make it very difficult to get good performance when you go beyond about 16 threads (e.g. no differentiation between thread-private and shared data, no immutable-after-creation data types) but which were not a problem for single-threaded performance.
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By "from academia" they probably meant just "pure and untainted by worldly matters".
Some time ago, Pacal and BASIC came from professors and were quite popular until recently.
And this one is undeniably "from academia" in literal sense:
History
The design of Scala started in 2001 at the Ãcole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) by Martin Odersky, following on from work on Funnel, a programming language combining ideas from functional programming and Petri nets.[5][not in citation given] Odersky had previously worked on Generic Java and javac, Sun's Java compiler.[5]
Scala was released late 2003 / early 2004 on the Java platform, and on the .NET platform in June 2004.[3][5][6] A second version of the language, v2.0, was released in March 2006.[3]
On 17 January 2011 the Scala team won a 5 year research grant of over â2.3 million from the European Research Council.[7] On 12 May 2011, Odersky and collaborators launched Typesafe, a company to provide commercial support, training, and services for Scala. Typesafe received $3 million investment from Greylock Partners.[8][9][10][11]
Anyways, it's just too opinionated, from his 4 examples - PHP, JS, Python, Ruby - only PHP and JS are really widespread, with Ruby still rather rare and Python somewhere inbetween.
And then there's this pearl:
the languages designed by academics who are obsessed with internal consistency and correctness include a bunch of mostly dead tongues: Fortran, Cobol, Lisp, C and Smalltalk.
TL;DR: This dude doesn't know shit about history (well, and present as well)
Good grief, what a profound misunderstanding of the entire field this post represents.
If you have an interest in this field, you need to spend some serious time with Haskell and LISP before you even begin to think about writing longwinded comments about how all languages are fundamentally the same.
It is trivially true that any program you can write in [language X] you can also write in assembler, and therefore C. If the entire field of programming languages could be summarized like this, why aren't we all using assembler?
The insight only comes when you understand this thing called "abstraction" and why it's useful. There is a reason I use Django templates, and don't usually write HTML-producing code in C. There is a reason I use LISP when I'm doing natural language processing. I can do more work in one line of Python than you can do in 100 lines of C. The right language for the job can make two orders of magnitude difference in productivity. If you don't understand that, please, STFU.
I have programmed professionally in more than 30 languages including machine codes, assemblers, FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, C,C++, lisp, Prolog, and a variety of "4GL"s. I have used Java and Python since retirement and I can say one thing for sure about them all. Choose the right one for the job and you're half way done, choose (or be forced into) the wrong one and you you are going to pay for it in blood, sweat and eventually tears. On at least two projects (each being more than 50 man years of design and coding effort) it was worth devising a new language with a syntax suited to the problem and writing the compiler. For some jobs, readability of the code by non IT staff can give a huge payoff, for others raw performance is the only criteria. Real time interaction with physical systems usually needs a "lower" level, C or even assembler, Complex data requires object orientated structures and for once off "need it today" jobs, Java might be the answer. Maintainability brings another load of constraints, as does the intended "longevity" of the project, and don't get me started on the whole domain of "proof of correctness".
It is very easy to forget that a language is just a tool. If you only have a hammer you will find screwing a problem, but then you are reading this on slashdot.
nec sorte nec fato
Ideally, programming should be a playground accessible to all, not like today where it's more of a military discipline camp accessible to all.
I very strongly disagree. Good programming can't allow for lack of discipline. People who go for more "elaborate" languages, with loads of libraries available, should be forced to understand what goes on behind the scenes.
I remember a researcher in a biotech company I used to work for, who tried to get help on forums on the Internet, and published parts of her ruby code (she'd had a 4 hour lessons of ruby once at university). The code included (read-only) account passwords to a research database and her own AD password in the company. Plus the variable names left little doubt as to what she was working on at the time.
Bottom line is: she didn't know what she was doing, but someone trusted her with code, and put the company's research at risk. So no, programming is not a playground, it's a serious matter. And as far as you don't understand what a buffer overflow is (and a load of other things), your employer shouldn't allow you to code.
Any Turing complete language provides an infinite number of ways of solving any given problem. The difference between a good language and a bad one is whether the easiest and most obvious way of doing something is the correct way. The existence of things like register globals and magic quotes that can only be used incorrectly is a good sign of poor design.
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I did not advocate abolishing good coding practice or the "hard" languages, or intelligent thought.
I mean there ought to be a programming language my little sister could use casually. An intially level and smoothly steepning ramp to ease users into the world of coding. Not the current case where it's pretty much a solid veritical wall that is only slowly chipped down.
Example of inexperienced people doing stupid thing with professional grade stuff is common, your example is equivalent to some dense person in a workshop that ruins some woodworking tool by putting metal it in. Which is not an argument for banning all entry grade powertools. It's just an anecdote about a stupid guy, or girl in your case.
I disagree. For me, there are three important points to discuss programming languages:
1. Syntax
2. Access
3. Community
ad 1) We know all about and can analyse the syntax. Fine. All the discussion happens here. .NET lacks here, and massively because there is no spirit to make libraries available to others for free causing a non-availability of free libraries.
ad 2) But what does the finest Haskell help me if I can't access a CD, Bluetooth or a XMPP server, and whether it makes a difference where I want to run the code (web server, mobile phone, mainframe, laptop). In principle, all languages are Turing-complete and equivalent, and I can write wrappers between languages, but as long as I can't *practically* do all the things I need, I'm stuck. The available libraries/access methods draw a picture of what is possible. Here C due to its age, Java with it's tendency to make package that are reusable and Python are among the best (from my experience). As an aside,
ad 3) A language is also dominated by its users. This is most noticable with PHP. The background of users dominates what a language should do. Also, this determines the amount of help and easy-to-access documentation. Which again makes a language popular or not.
One individual is not capable of addressing (2). Also, whether a language is picked up by the masses (3), or whether you can build and hold this community, is not a rational, predictable process. When designing a language, you don't have full control over success.
When comparing two languages, don't just look at (1), also look at (2) and (3).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
1) Some programming languages are great for all the code you have to write. They are very powerful, very expressive, high performance, etc etc.
2) Other programming languages are great for all the code you DON'T have to write! They have lots of _good_ well documented standard or defacto standard libraries, modules, so you don't actually have to write stuff for a lot of things.
Being a crappy lazy programmer I prefer languages that satisfy both 1) and 2), but with 2) as a priority. Because I end up having to write a lot less and it's not my responsibility to document, support and fix those libraries. Yes I may have to fix or workaround some of the library bugs, but it's not really my job...
The good libraries are written by programmers far better than me, so if I use their stuff instead of reinventing it, it means fewer bugs and higher quality.
Of course, if you are a great programmer your priority would be 1). 2) only being a minor factor.
4. IDEs and tools
Does it have a wysiwyg gui designer?
Can I hotswap code during debugging?
Refactoring?
Can I get documentation on a function just by hovering my mouse over it?
Are there automated bug finders?