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."

Comments

Examples include

[ProgrammerJulia]

"PHP, JavaScript, Python and Ruby".. not convincing. Even C# and .NET are better languages than those (it really is). And give me back C/C++ or Assembly any day. But those 'examples' are worst of all.

Re:Examples include

[JoeMerchant]

What serious developer doesn't use PDO/mysqli and prepared statements?

I've been programming for 30 years, 20 for pay, 15 in some management capacity (always with at least 50% hands on coding time), and I don't know what the hell you're talking about, I suppose I could Google it, but why?

Re:Doomed

[Barbara, not Barbie]

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?

We all are - just that in 99.999% of the cases, it's hidden away by the implementation, since your cpu won't run anything except binary opcodes anyway.

Throw in that 99.99% of "programmers" don't know assembler, and aren't even comfortable with anything except scripting languages, and now you see why most development sucks.

Scripting languages encourage sloppy programming - you can always just edit the script and run ... and if it works, what the heck, right? After all, it's not like you have any strict type checking because it's just a stupid script. You don't need to declare your variables - it'll create them on the fly - and even change their type without warning you.

If all you know is how to write scripts, you're not a real programmer. Tsk, tsk.