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"Clinical Trials" For Programming Languages?
theodp writes "High school junior Charles Dawson's New Year resolution is to write a new program in different language each week. It's an ambitious project for someone of any age, and while it won't give him an in-depth appreciation of programming language differences, it'll certainly give him greater insight into the strengths of certain languages than would perusing the Hello World Wikipedia article. Lots of claims are made about the comparative productivity of programming languages, but have there been any landmark studies that measure the efficacy of a programming language's productivity claims in a 'clinical trial' of sorts? Would head-to-head tests against other languages be a better way of sorting out Popularity vs Productivity vs Performance claims, or is relying on more nebulous claims of superiority the best we can do?"
PHP is unparalleled for people who want to make a webpage without having to understand HTTP.
Or PHP for that matter...
(...kidding...)
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
long flamewar
To do this flamewar properly little Charlie Dawson should post his findings every week so we can keep this thing going until he finally realizes his dream of pissing off every programmer.
Master Po: The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL, Grasshopper, if you can avoid it.
Grace Hopper: My name isn't Grasshopper, and I will program in whatever I want!
Ezekiel 23:20
It's only a flamewar until you agree that there are 2 types of programming languages:
- Those everyone bitches about
- And those nobody uses
pissing off every programmer.
Well, everybody except LISP programmers ofcourse, as that will turn out to be the best language.
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