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Programming Language Checklist

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Re: Programming Language Checklist

#91

Post by everdev »

> [ ] Syntax is what makes programming difficult

I'd love to see language design and language development treated as different disciplines.

Just like developers were the first web designers, developers have been the first language designers.

Ideally a language designer would only be tasked with how to express complex ideas in a simple, composable syntax.

Language developers would be tasked with everything else: basically making those ideas work as efficiently and consistently as possible.

Not to say a language designer and developer can't be the same person, but I think there might be some benefit to having a linguist (with some understanding of development) and a developer (with some understanding of linguistics) team up on a new language.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#92

Post by gdy »

rodw wrote: post #80
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.…

>I think Lua may actually pre-date JS

And it does

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#93

Post by harikb »

shadowgovt wrote: post #85

"The name of your language makes it impossible to find on Google" --> [ ] Google has made its own language with a name near to yours and has stolen all the search results from you

I don’t think Google needs to steal a language name. They fuck it up and create a non-searchable name just as well on their own.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#94

Post by grzm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #79
grzm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;)

> "I won't say how I know"

Why so mysterious? ;)

Do you have a pointer to anything that predates the link I provide? From what I gather, that's the website of one of the listed authors. If you have an earlier link to something that looks like an earlier draft, that would be nice to have for us armchair internet historians.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#95

Post by lmkg »

harikb wrote: post #93
shadowgovt wrote: post #85

"The name of your language makes it impossible to find on Google" --> [ ] Google has made its own language with a name near to yours and has stolen all the search results from you

I don’t think Google needs to steal a language name. They fuck it up and create a non-searchable name just as well on their own.

GP may be referencing the Go! programming language, which predates the Go programming language by several years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#96

Post by hderms »

everdev wrote: post #91

> [ ] Syntax is what makes programming difficult I'd love to see language design and language development treated as different disciplines. Just like developers were the first web designers, developers have been the first language designers. Ideally a language designer would only be tasked with how to express complex ideas in a simple, composable syntax. Language developers would be tasked with everything else: basic…

I agree as the biggest test of new language features that involve syntax changes is not the superficial situations it makes easier, but how that feature works with other features that currently exist.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#97

Post by hderms »

shadowgovt wrote: post #77

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 profilin…

This is why I personally prefer Scala to Haskell

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#98

Post by rsynnott »

mumblemumble wrote: post #89
wongarsu wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps Cocoa development, though it typically used a GUI tool for the UI layout, so not really. Smalltalk, but Smalltalk MVC is different from what MVC typically means nowadays. FWIW, WPF uses MVVM, not MVC. The differences are as subtle and pedantic as they are important.

I'm not sure how common vs not common Interface Builder usage really is. At any rate, I'd say "typically" is a stretch.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#99

Post by mumblemumble »

rodw wrote: post #80
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.…

JScript is misunderstood. It isn't a proprietary JavaScript competitor. It's just Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript. They had to use a different name when talking about it in order to get around trademark issues.

There were some differences from Netscape's implementation, but they're pretty minor compared to the dialectical differences between competing implementations of pretty much any other language.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#100

Post by mumblemumble »

rsynnott wrote: post #98
mumblemumble wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Cocoa development, though it typically used a GUI tool for the UI layout, so not really. Smalltalk, but Smalltalk MVC is different from what MVC typically means nowadays. FWIW, WPF uses MVVM, not MVC. The differences are as subtle and pedantic as they are important.

I'm not sure how common vs not common Interface Builder usage really is. At any rate, I'd say "typically" is a stretch.

That's fair. My experience on the subject is admittedly pretty ancient. When I was doing it, back in the early 2000s, IB was how everyone I knew did it.
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