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Programming Language Checklist

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Re: Programming Language Checklist

#111

Post by leshow »

This checklist comes across as incredibly ignorant. We push forward with research into all kinds of things, processors, hardware, mathematics, etc. The fact that PLT should somehow be exempt is silly. New languages coming out that do something different are a testing ground for features, some will become popular, most won't.

Sometimes there is a real advantage to writing real world applications in some particular language. Maybe you are writing something that needs to be performant, safe, and low level, so Rust is an attractive option. Maybe you are writing web front-ends and you see the benefit of a type system like what's available in Typescript. There are lots of reasons not to just write everything in C or Java. Don't be sour because we aren't all using the same language for 50 years; we've made advancements in computer science and that's reflected in our tools.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#112

Post by leshow »

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…

A language is a tool that was built to solve some kind of problem, but no language is built to be the best at all problems. There are pros and cons to using it depending on the task just like anything else. You have to consider what you want to do and pick and language that aligns with your goals.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#113

Post by leetrout »

shawnz wrote: post #83
leetrout wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

What if you actually wanted to replace the entire document contents with a new document? Why should that be an error? The fact that the meaning of the API is commonly misunderstood is not (necessarily) a fault of the API

Sure, something like a .clear or similar but the default behavior of clearing a loaded document by calling open on it is strange compared to what you would expect to happen with “normal” files/streams.

Edit to add:

I think calling write on a loaded document should have been an exceptional case and you should have had to explicitly call something to unload, replace or clear it.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#115

Post by TheCoelacanth »

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

JS and PHP are worse because people have to use them.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#116

Post by mumblemumble »

hajile wrote: post #109
mumblemumble wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You misunderstand the real evil of JScript. Microsoft made it to be a complete clone of Netscape's implementation. When Netscape decided to standardize the language, they went to ECMA. Microsoft didn't have ECMA completely under their thumb, but did have some control. Netscape wanted to fix some fundamental issues with JS, but MS had just spent a ton of money making their clone, so they insisted all those problematic…

That's all beside the point. The focus of the discussion was whether JScript could be described as a new language ("you have reinvented...") that's basically Javascript but worse. It can't, because it fails the "new language" test: it's just a different name for the same language.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#117

Post by bananabreakfast »

leshow wrote: post #111

This checklist comes across as incredibly ignorant. We push forward with research into all kinds of things, processors, hardware, mathematics, etc. The fact that PLT should somehow be exempt is silly. New languages coming out that do something different are a testing ground for features, some will become popular, most won't. Sometimes there is a real advantage to writing real world applications in some particular lan…

Woosh

This is satire of HN, not an actual checklist

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#118

Post by augusto-moura »

leshow wrote: post #111

This checklist comes across as incredibly ignorant. We push forward with research into all kinds of things, processors, hardware, mathematics, etc. The fact that PLT should somehow be exempt is silly. New languages coming out that do something different are a testing ground for features, some will become popular, most won't. Sometimes there is a real advantage to writing real world applications in some particular lan…

The checklist isn't saying that all the points apply to all languages.

It's a framework to evaluate other people languages (or your own)

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#119

Post by airstrike »

krapp wrote: post #51
chrisweekly wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that it's not javascript's fault per se. But the rest of your comment represents a narrow, dated and frankly ignorant viewpoint. Component-based front-end architecture has tremendous advantages. And if you want to see "one big mess", simply examine the CSS of virtually any moderately-sized website or web application. I've been doing web-related development since the late 90's, and I make a living as a UI…

I'll just vaguely gesture in the general direction of the multitudes of developers on HN who both work with front-end frameworks and complain ceaselessly about what a nightmare it is and stand by my statement. It can have both tremendous advantages and be a mess. Both can be, and are, true.

o/

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#120

Post by NotATroll »

everdev wrote: post #90
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.

> You have reinvented Javascript but worse Any language that compiles to JavaScript. https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/technical-debt-and-tacking-... > lessons learned: > Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Any day now, I suspect some fools are going to want to write web apps, but they won’t want to use raw javascript and they’ll create some ridiculous custom language to javascript compiler. I…

> Any language that compiles to JavaScript.

What if I compile javascript... to javascript. So that I can have actually functioning javascript across the majority of fairly modern browsers, while using modern features.

All I'm saying is, honestly. I don't blame people for not writing straight javascript, when even if you do, you still need a build system in between if you want to support all browsers.

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