Slashdot Mirror
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."
Not quite true. There are believed to be a very large number of possible models for computation, of which functional and imperative programming are but two.
Most of them are unlikely to be particularly useful, but there is plenty of scope for new languages which exploit them.
"Languages designed by academics like FOTRTAN, COBOL, C"
Were apparently desighned by academics obsessed with internal consistency and are now mostly deat tounges.
These are contrasted with languages hacked up by people to get stuff done.
WTF?
FORTRAN was the first ever language and was hacked up by someone who wanted to get stuff done because ASM was too much of a pain in the neck. It was unlike the author's bizzare assertion the easiest to use language at the time of being written. That was the entire point! While its use may be on the decline, it has been in use for 55 years! And major important packages are still written in FORTRAN.
And C? Seriously? Yet another language which was hacked up by a bunch of hackers to get stuff done. Apparently it's mostly dead. Even though it is the main implementation of 3 of the "less academic" languages listed.
I'm surprised there isn't a "c++ is dieing haha lol!1!111" in there too. I'm glad the author never tried to argue that C++ has internal consistency (I do love C++, but...).
And COBOL being an academic language? Oh dear.
Conclusion: article is crap.
SJW n. One who posts facts.