Kieran Healy provides a pointer to how to understand different programming languages, and warns against upgrading:
Posted by DeLong at June 4, 2004 03:07 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postCrooked Timber: Don't Upgrade : APL is a pithy language.... A full explanation is available, but not from me. I recommend this page which contains opinions about APL and better-known languages like C (“A language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language”), C++ (“an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog”) and FORTRAN (“Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice”).
Interesting page. I've been writing software for 35 years, and I find it amazing the number of languages that have come and gone. Clicking on the letters is a true memory lane for me.
And more keep coming. You can find "true believers" for each one. My current favorite is Java, but I have gotten too old to try and convince anyone that this is going to be the Trend of the Future and the Most Important Programming Language Ever and (inevitably) The Only Programming Language Needed. Usually the propenents try to make the case for that.
For one thing, it ain't, no matter how good it is, and for another I'd rather spend my time coding.
Posted by: Alan on June 4, 2004 03:58 PMOne of the many annoying pretensions within computer science is the tendency of people to call many small collections of macros "languages." Thus you have this that and the other D.L., description languages, for making databases or communications protocols or timers or any damn thing at all work. SQL, a database "language" is a collection of about five words and a few rules for hanging them together. It's as though you called a traffic cop's handwaving a language. Well, yes, it is a language, but... Well, But.
Then it dawned on me the other day how you write a language: you just DEFUN whatever you want done in Lisp and compile it to machine code, and you've got yourself a language. Since Lisp, or Scheme in the version very accessible to everybody, is as simple as making an equation clear by putting parentheses in the right places, this means I can start writing my very own languages -- and shall do so.
LBL, light bulb language, will be in command of your house when every light bulb has its own URL. Coming soon.
as a really slow typist, C, being so terse, suits me just fine.
Unfortunately, it easier to write horrific/buggy code in C that just about any other language (except assembler, which is more mnemonic device than language...)
What, no C#? (See-Sharp)
My favorite quote from B.S.:
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#really-say-that
Strike a blow for RPG II! (Yeah, right.)
Posted by: Linkmeister on June 4, 2004 05:49 PMFinally, a post on a subject I've made my career about, and I have nothing pithy to add.
I'm a little peeved that the entire entry on Haskell is "A functional language". I think somebody really ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to Computer Programming Languages. (In which I'd want to insert the extremely geeky joke about how Haskell is "a mostly functional language" and almost nobody would get it.)
My favorite programming language is missing from the list: Objective Caml. Congratulations, Brad— you've flushed out all the computer language geeks in your readership.
Posted by: s9 on June 4, 2004 07:37 PMwell, darn, all the good jokes have been told
Posted by: rewoffl on June 4, 2004 07:47 PMIt didn't list OCaml, but it did list ML. Don't you think that's enough? "ML" is like "lisp": it describes a whole family of languages. If we started listing every dialect of lisp, we'd have a really long list!
Posted by: Matt Austern on June 4, 2004 09:35 PMI still occasionally work as a consultant to an old employer who has a 1.5 million line Pascal application for machine tool systems. I wrote my share of it.
Posted by: Fred Boness on June 4, 2004 10:42 PMI rather like Lisp because it's so easy to use. Also had automatic garbage collection back in the 1960s, whereas Java bragged about bringing it to the C-family in 1995! I'm concerned though: if I become an economist and a lisp user, will I know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, or the value of everything and the cost of nothing? Or will I know nothing at all? Or will I know everything?
Posted by: Julian Elson on June 5, 2004 02:55 AM* I have no delusions of Lisp being practical for most programs. I just like the structure.
Posted by: Julian Elson on June 5, 2004 02:55 AMSQL, a database "language" is a collection of about five words and a few rules for hanging them together.
That's a very simplistic way of describing the ANSI SQL standard, that also contains many other things, including description of how to handle concurrency etc.
Also, what else is language than a vocabularium of some words, and a syntax of how they can be put together, so they can be parsed by other enitities?
Languages don't have to be complex to be a language.
Sorry, the first paragraph is a quote from an earlier comment.
Posted by: Kristjan Wager on June 5, 2004 05:34 AMOcaml is enough not like ML that it probably deserves to be called out separately. It is a lot less like ML than Scheme is like CLOS. The comparison is probably more like the difference between Object Pascal and Module-2.
Posted by: s9 on June 5, 2004 07:57 AMAh it would be nice to have a language with easy inetrepretratibility and dynamic function binding (ca 1957) Cool Lisp. I even have somewhere the classic ''Lisp 1.5 reference manual'' or whatever it's called.
Oops we need to have compilers -- New language MacLisp, Franz lisp
Somewhere in the interim we get Emacs and lots of capabilities for customizing (which I still use)
Ooops we need namespace separation .. new language Common lisp
Oops we need objects,... new language Smalltalk (or addendum thereof Common Lisp object system)
Oops, we should have lexical scoping and continuations.. new language Scheme
Oops we should have polymorphism . new language: ML or CAML (no parentheses in these though)
Oops we should have transportable code ... I dunno what that language is called.
And meanwhile, the /. crowd is "inventing "new interpreted languages all the time Perl 4. Perl 5 etc, Python, each one being the latest invention since sliced bread.
Naah. Who funds this stuff?
I'll just stick with gawk and emacs lisp.
Java, and the associated frameworks, seems as if it's becoming the product of metastasized bureaucracy.
I'm still partial to Objective-C.
Posted by: Jon H on June 5, 2004 05:14 PMRe: "I'm still partial to Objective-C."
You and Steve Jobs...
Posted by: Brad DeLong on June 7, 2004 09:23 PMHmmmmm interesting
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