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Programming Language Checklist

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Re: Programming Language Checklist

#71

Post by baq »

wsc981 wrote: post #63
mhd wrote: post #28

> [ ] You have reinvented Javascript but worse > [ ] You have reinvented PHP but worse I'm trying to think of languages that would fit that bill. That almost sounds like a challenge.

Brainfuck [0], Whitespace [1] and INTERCAL [2] come to mind :) Of course, one could argue none of these are 'serious' programming languages. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

> [ ] You have reinvented Brainfuck but non-ironically

:)

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#72

Post by tchaffee »

wongarsu wrote: post #45
tchaffee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separation of concerns can be handled in one language. The popular MVC pattern does not require three separate languagues. And in fact that's rare in my experience. So web frameworks moving towards the norm and allowing it to all be handled in the same language should not be surprising or a mess.

>The popular MVC pattern does not require three separate languagues. And in fact that's rare in my experience. ASP.NET MVC uses C#, (C)HTML and CSS for a total of three languages. WPF uses XAML and C# for a total of two. Android uses XML and Java for a total of two. I think Delphi only uses one, I vaguely remember the designer outputting plain Delphi instructions? I might be misremembering. React is not exactly encou…

Of course when it comes to the web it's three languages underneath. Per the standard, you can't escape that. Now look at apps that are built to run on an OS using MVC. It's usually all in the same language. Why?

Separation of concerns doesn't imply separate languages. There might be some merit to the idea of a DSL for each concern? But if the end result of that experiment includes CSS, I would call the experiment a failure.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#73

Post by mumblemumble »

mhd wrote: post #28

> [ ] You have reinvented Javascript but worse > [ ] You have reinvented PHP but worse I'm trying to think of languages that would fit that bill. That almost sounds like a challenge.

Arguably:

  PHP is like Javascript but worse.
  Since React, Javascript is like PHP but worse.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#74

Post by wongarsu »

tchaffee wrote: post #72
wongarsu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The popular MVC pattern does not require three separate languagues. And in fact that's rare in my experience. ASP.NET MVC uses C#, (C)HTML and CSS for a total of three languages. WPF uses XAML and C# for a total of two. Android uses XML and Java for a total of two. I think Delphi only uses one, I vaguely remember the designer outputting plain Delphi instructions? I might be misremembering. React is not exactly encou…

Of course when it comes to the web it's three languages underneath. Per the standard, you can't escape that. Now look at apps that are built to run on an OS using MVC. It's usually all in the same language. Why? Separation of concerns doesn't imply separate languages. There might be some merit to the idea of a DSL for each concern? But if the end result of that experiment includes CSS, I would call the experiment a f…

Android, WPF and Universal Windows all use XML to specify UI, and the programming language of choice to specify code. That's still two languages, even if it removes the need for a third language exclusively for styles. In each you could use pure code to build the UI but readability and maintainability would suffer a lot, so nobody does that. Once you have the view separated from the controller, writing the view in a language better suited for nested UI seems quite natural.

What are examples of MVC using only one language?

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#75

Post by leetrout »

mumblemumble wrote: post #73
mhd wrote: post #28

> [ ] You have reinvented Javascript but worse > [ ] You have reinvented PHP but worse I'm trying to think of languages that would fit that bill. That almost sounds like a challenge.

Arguably: PHP is like Javascript but worse. Since React, Javascript is like PHP but worse.

document.write called on a loaded document? Reopen it and clear its contents. Yes because that makes sense and I wouldn’t want that to be an error state. Oh JavaScript.

(But also, just don’t use document.write)

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#76

Post by cinnamonheart »

cies wrote: post #14

I got an idea for a language where the code in the file format is some intermediary language, which you write with an editor plugin that makes it more human-readable. The editor plugin (in contrast to existing language plugins) also translates the error msgs back to the human-readable code. Just an idea, but I could not get it to fit in the questionaire :)

Have you heard of Unison? If not, it may interest you -- it stores code in a syntax tree rather than as text directly.

https://www.unisonweb.org/

>Unison is a language in which programs are not text. That is, the source of truth for a program is not its textual representation as source code, but its structured representation as an abstract syntax tree.

It has some further goals for doing this which are really exciting to me, such as content-addressable code, but the starting point is similar to the one you stated. :)

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#77

Post by shadowgovt »

When I was younger, I imagined there would come along a true language that would solve my problems.

It took me a long time (and a lot of banging my head into bad environments) to realize that language matters a lot less when the IDE is well-configured and fluent with what I want to do, the toolchain allows for experimentation without ruining the ability to do large, collaborative work, and both debugging and profiling are possible. And those are things you can't really add to a language environment when the language itself (spec and implementation) is constantly in flux.

Maybe a language will appear one day that renders all those tools obsolete, but we still evaluate and run code on real machines and it's still written by human beings so I sincerely doubt it.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#78

Post by shadowgovt »

cies wrote: post #61
outadoc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you just invented AppleScript!

i feel it's more like LISP (the AST is the language) or like Haskell's or Rust's intermediary languages.

LISP coupled with an IDE that let you plug in higher-level abstract editors that represented their state as valid LISP code could almost fit the bill.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#79

Post by shadowgovt »

grzm wrote: post #3
dang wrote: post #2

Has there really been only one big thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784085 Edit: well, there's also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836410 Can anybody track down the year this was written?

Looks like it goes back to at least November, 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20111103024132/http://colinm.org...

It's older than that. I won't say how I know, but bits and pieces of this were tumbling around in the undergrad hivemind of a certain Pittsburgh university for awhile before 2011. ;)

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#80

Post by rodw »

mhd wrote: post #28

> [ ] You have reinvented Javascript but worse > [ ] You have reinvented PHP but worse I'm trying to think of languages that would fit that bill. That almost sounds like a challenge.

Maybe JScript (Microsoft's proprietary JavaScript) and/or VBScript (VB sometimes shoehorned into a JavaScript-style role) would work for the first one, but to be honest I don't have enough experience with either to know if the "but worse" statement is fair.

Also the "sweet spot" for Lua has some overlap with JavaScript but I don't think the "but worse" complaint is quite fair and I think Lua may actually pre-date JS.

But surely there are a bunch of HTML templating languages that would fit the category of "PHP but worse".

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