Linked by snydeq on Sun 11th Dec 2011 01:35 UTC
Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 -- 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'
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Member since:2005-11-13
I find myself agreeing with all this author's supporting evidence, and yet I'm leaning away from his conclusion.
Yeah, me too. He does a good job outlining the problem, but I can't agree with the solution he proposes. I don't know if I have a solution myself, except to say that for me personally, the biggest pain in the ass part about learning a new language is learning the APIs/framework behind it. For example, C# is not a hard language to learn, but the .NET framework is a monster.
Thus, I think we should work towards standardizing the APIs/frameworks, then there could be 3,000 different programming languages, and you could hop from one to the other with relative ease.
RE[2]: Do I agree or not?
by JAlexoid on Sun 11th Dec 2011 04:25
in reply to "RE: Do I agree or not?"
Member since:2009-05-19
Member since:2005-08-17
Features
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2011-01-28
I find myself agreeing with all this author's supporting evidence, and yet I'm leaning away from his conclusion. No, I don't think we need yet another new language syntax.
Personally I'd rather work on a way to make existing languages more interoperable to make the choice of languages less restrictive.