Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

xent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#31

Post by madair »

arethuza wrote: post #17
nailer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done I love Python too, but it's not without its quirks. Eg: ','.join(mylist) Which nearly everyone I know at first assumed would be: list.join(',') Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.

I was about to write about how horrible that is when I realized that I do that all the time in jQuery: $(" Foo ").appendTo(bar)

That's not the same, $(...) is a method which creates a list. ',' is a string. So actually you're doing exactly the opposite of the python idiom.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#32

Post by bobbyi »

nailer wrote: post #11
X-Istence wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love Python, can't stand Ruby. The reason I love Python is that in general when I want to write something a certain way, or what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done. As a programmer it gets out of my way and lets me do what I need to get done. The author to a certain degree is calling for exactly that, a language that makes tasks that every programmer does over and…

> what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done I love Python too, but it's not without its quirks. Eg: ','.join(mylist) Which nearly everyone I know at first assumed would be: list.join(',') Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.

It's a convenience so that every iterable object in the world doesn't need to implement a join() method. I pass generator expressions to join as often as lists, so it works out well that the method is on the string rather than the list.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#33

Post by scott_s »

Go is a systems programming language. It's not appropriate to expect Go to be able to send an email or create a web server in one line. Go is supposed to be a better systems programming language than C. It's not supposed to be a high level language with all of the things that he wants.

Also, language designers have to maintain a balance between improving the language and maintaining stability so that programmers can actually get work done. I think Guido is doing a good job of this (even though I might disagree with some of his design decisions).

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#34

Post by agentultra »

stcredzero wrote: post #22
agentultra wrote: post #21

I think he started with a point but devolved into a lot of wishful thinking. Why not focus on the solution rather than hoping someone is going to listen to you complain and make it all better? I'm sure they could use the help.

Wishful thinking? A lot of what he suggests have straightforward implementations as "built-in" features. (Something that looks "built-in" anyhow.) Perl tried to be pretty much the language he suggests, but it was put together with a poor sense of language design. Ruby tried to correct Perl's mistakes, but also succumbed to the "kitchen sink" mentality. Python tried to correct many earlier mistakes, but while it was m…

http://www.skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html

The premise as I understand it is that modern languages are broken and have failed to evolve. An interesting point. A good start for an argument.

However, his rant devolves into:

"REAL WORLD, modern datatypes, built-in, literal, batteries-included PLEASE!!! If the following aren't first-class types with first-class literal constructors / representations supported at the language level then your new programming language ISN'T EVEN ON THE PLAYING FIELD"

No evidence. Not even a mention as to how he's reasoned that these statements are true. Nothing.

Why does my compiler/interpreter need to have an "email" data-type? Why is my language not even "on the playing field" without it? Why are there so many successful programming languages then that survive without it?

I can empathise with his frustrations. There are plenty of times on the job when I feel more like a glorified digital plumber. Deserializing/reserializing data and pushing it through various pipes isn't glorious work. But lets take the argument from there rather than flapping our arms and making frantic claims that everything the way it is is inherently broken because it's not the way we'd like it to be.

(And maybe he does just need a good dose of Lisp ;)

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#36

Post by gcb »

nailer wrote: post #11
X-Istence wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love Python, can't stand Ruby. The reason I love Python is that in general when I want to write something a certain way, or what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done. As a programmer it gets out of my way and lets me do what I need to get done. The author to a certain degree is calling for exactly that, a language that makes tasks that every programmer does over and…

> what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done I love Python too, but it's not without its quirks. Eg: ','.join(mylist) Which nearly everyone I know at first assumed would be: list.join(',') Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.

i like that because it's a string's method returning a string.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#37

Post by arethuza »

madair wrote: post #31
arethuza wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to write about how horrible that is when I realized that I do that all the time in jQuery: $(" Foo ").appendTo(bar)

That's not the same, $(...) is a method which creates a list. ',' is a string. So actually you're doing exactly the opposite of the python idiom.

Possibly, but that div is a literal chunk of HTML so that's arguably closer to a string than the normal jQuery selectors.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#38

Post by cabalamat »

bobbyi wrote: post #32
nailer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done I love Python too, but it's not without its quirks. Eg: ','.join(mylist) Which nearly everyone I know at first assumed would be: list.join(',') Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.

It's a convenience so that every iterable object in the world doesn't need to implement a join() method. I pass generator expressions to join as often as lists, so it works out well that the method is on the string rather than the list.

> It's a convenience so that every iterable object in the world doesn't need to implement a join() method.

The way to do this would be to have an IterableMixin that implements join() (and a load of other stuff) so long as the subclass implements a small number of basic methods.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#39

Post by c00p3r »

Unfortunately, what he talks about is some yet another scripting language, not a system, close-to-hardware-level programming language.

Go is just a C 2.0 developed by its fathers and it's based on early works on Plan 9 project (if I understands correctly).

So, it is language for OS-level programming and, perhaps, google's own native client, and community will code and release lots of high-level libraries, as it happened for C or, say, perl.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#40

Post by urlwolf »

weavejester wrote: post #13

It seems to me as if he is mostly complaining about the lack of libraries to handle basic operations, rather than programming language syntax or design.

Which is a problem orders of magnitude easier to solve than designing a language from the ground up.
Post reply on HN