'Hello World' Considered Harmful?
Linked by RandomGuy on Wed 10th Jun 2009 20:00 UTC
General Development This series is aimed at programming language aficionados. There's a lot of very abstract writing about programming languages and a lot of simple minded "language X sux!" style blog posts by people who know next to nothing about programming. What I feel is sorely missing is a kind of article that deliberately sacrifices the last 10% of precision that make the theoretical articles dry and long winded but still makes a point and discusses the various trade offs involved. This series is meant to fill that void and hopefully start a lot of discussions that are more enlightening than the articles themselves. I will point out some parallels in different parts of computing that I haven't seen mentioned as well as analyze some well known rules of thumb and link to interesting blogs and articles.
E-mail Print r 3   · Read More · 61 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/gpe
Thread beginning with comment 367819
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE: Topics for Future Articles
by sergio on Wed 10th Jun 2009 23:31 UTC in reply to "Topics for Future Articles"
sergio
Member since:
2005-07-06

"Adding features" is THE problem... that's why C++, C#, Perl, etc sucks.

Programming languages MUST be simple and straightforward (like C and classic Java). If you want features write a library, don't mess with the language.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RandomGuy Member since:
2006-07-30

Well, yes and no.
Adding features _later_on_ makes debugging a nightmare.
That's the problem with extending languages which is otherwise a very smart evolutionary path - just see the success of C++.
Having features in the language right from the start that noobs don't use is something entirely different.

Ideally you would put as much as possible into libraries. Google for "growing a language", you might like it.

Now as for making static languages more dynamic:
I think adding optional static typing to dynamic languages is a better approach IF - and this is critical - IF you have coding guidelines in place and enforced. That's the short answer, the long one is in an article a few weeks down the road.

Reply Parent Score: 2

arbour42 Member since:
2005-07-06

you wrote: "Now as for making static languages more dynamic: I think adding optional static typing to dynamic languages is a better approach IF - and this is critical - IF you have coding guidelines in place and enforced. That's the short answer, the long one is in an article a few weeks down the road."

So just like Perl 6 is doing now, adding optional static typing. I think the Parrot open-source "Common Language Runtime" and Perl 6 will be huge in about 2-3 years time. I'd be interested in that article.

I'll check out "growing a language." You have a good idea for the article, but just need to tighten it up a bit - it tended to meander. Sorry to be critical, but i double-majored in Poetry, and can be a bit anal sometime :-)

Reply Parent Score: 1

vivainio Member since:
2008-12-26

"Adding features" is THE problem... that's why C++, C#, Perl, etc sucks.


That's Java propaganda.

Plethora of features of C++ was never a problem with C++. The problem was the crappy standard library, and manual memory management.

C++ is pretty good these days (Qt is free!), and with next C++ standard we will get new *features* which will make C++ better (i.e. reduce the verbosity of C++ programs, and make hacking it more fun).

These days I see a market for two languages: C++ and Python. With those, you've covered pretty much everything and you can just ignore the middle-goers like Java or C#, and the restricted & "manual" world of C.

Reply Parent Score: 2