Is this just my feeling or this this text completely ignore languages which are of functional / declarative nature?
Iirc Prolog doesnt "care" so much about performance (on a language level at least). Haskell knows Integer, Rational, Num etc. Same goes for Idris
Languages from that area (lambda calculus) are, by definition, not based on the idea of some specific computer architecture.
Totally possible that i missinterpreted something tho.
All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#12IMO the biggest problems with almost all popular programming languages are 1) null 2) exception based error handling such that, when you call foo() where foo is String foo(){ blabla } you can get a String, null OR an exception (!!!) and most compilers happily let you treat it as if it only ever returns a String. I hope some day null is no longer a thing, and that Functional Programming types like Option, Either, Try…
Ive thought a bit about this, and how is Option types (which I like and prefer to error checking) really different from the compiler emitting an error when you fail to explicitely check for nulls and stdlib returning nulls when you have one ?
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#13> Most current-day programming languages seem to be based on the idea that computation is slow, so the user and the compiler must work hard to minimize the number of instructions executed.
Instructions executed is not the only metric to consider! It doesn't makes sense to have loads and stores in the program with all of them having a cache miss.
Does the author mean that the memory hasn't caught up with the computation here? I don't think so.
> For example, one cache miss might take as much time as a hundred add instructions.
This is why compiler must work hard!
> Today's languages contain far too many features that do almost the same thing but have slightly different performance characteristics, for example regular and virtual functions in C++. This just encourages programmers to waste time on micro-optimization when they could instead invest time understanding the large-scale behavior of their program and optimizing that.
Not all programs need to worry about insane performance. But most do. It is totally upto the developers to choose the features of the language which they need. Choosing the right features/language for the right kind of programs is an important skill. Efficient code generation for all possible hardwares and all possible workloads with a restricted language features is not going to work or else Python would have been one of the very few languages to survive. Elon Musk wouldn't have tweeted that he needs C/C++ engineers ;-)
It seems the article suggests that neither the hard working compiler nor the hardware friendly language is required to get good performance!
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#14IMO the biggest problems with almost all popular programming languages are 1) null 2) exception based error handling such that, when you call foo() where foo is String foo(){ blabla } you can get a String, null OR an exception (!!!) and most compilers happily let you treat it as if it only ever returns a String. I hope some day null is no longer a thing, and that Functional Programming types like Option, Either, Try…
I am probably in the minority here but I think Java was on the right track with checked exceptions.
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#15IMO the biggest problems with almost all popular programming languages are 1) null 2) exception based error handling such that, when you call foo() where foo is String foo(){ blabla } you can get a String, null OR an exception (!!!) and most compilers happily let you treat it as if it only ever returns a String. I hope some day null is no longer a thing, and that Functional Programming types like Option, Either, Try…
Ive thought a bit about this, and how is Option types (which I like and prefer to error checking) really different from the compiler emitting an error when you fail to explicitely check for nulls and stdlib returning nulls when you have one ?
Because it forces (or at least strongly encourages) you/users of such a stdlib/API to explicitly think about and handle the null case and the non-null case if you want to access the contents directly / unwrap. At least that's the idea.
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#16Does anyone else consider these type of articles the clickbait of the programming world? They tend to all follow the formula of
1. Make over the top statement in title.
2. Vaguely address the over the top statement in content.
For example the author hasn't shown us why "All" programming languages are "wrong". They haven't shown how they would fix them to make them "right". Their premises (e.g. "computation is almost always free") are flawed.
I wonder, if the title was called "A rant about some popular programming language paradigms" would it be as popular?
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#17Does anyone else consider these type of articles the clickbait of the programming world? They tend to all follow the formula of 1. Make over the top statement in title. 2. Vaguely address the over the top statement in content. For example the author hasn't shown us why "All" programming languages are "wrong". They haven't shown how they would fix them to make them "right". Their premises (e.g. "computation is almost…
Agreed. Between Lobste.rs and HN its becoming increasingly difficult to filter out worth-while content.
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#18While computation might be sometimes pecuniarily cheap, it is often environmentally costly.
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#19He claims all programming languages are wrong and then he bashes C++ virtual functions vs regular functions, C++ templates, single dispatch and fixed precision arithmetic. Looks like "all languages" means C++ to him.
There exist languages with arbitrary precision arithmetic, e.g. Python or languages with much sophisticated polymorphism e.g. Haskell, Scala or Rust.
Re: All Programming Languages are Wrong (2018)
#20IMO the biggest problems with almost all popular programming languages are 1) null 2) exception based error handling such that, when you call foo() where foo is String foo(){ blabla } you can get a String, null OR an exception (!!!) and most compilers happily let you treat it as if it only ever returns a String. I hope some day null is no longer a thing, and that Functional Programming types like Option, Either, Try…
I am probably in the minority here but I think Java was on the right track with checked exceptions.
I used to think so, but
* Java also has unchecked exceptions, and, incredibly, there's still no consensus as to which exceptions should be used for what and when, though these days the most common approach is to simply stick only to RuntimeExceptions, which is terrible.
* Functional error handling using Option, Either, Try etc are arguably much simpler, safer and more powerful than exceptions.
Simpler because they don't rely on dedicated syntax- they're just regular objects no different to any other object.
Safer because unlike exceptions, they force callers to handle all potential outcomes, but no more. (no risk of ignoring errors and no risk of catching a higher level of error than desired, ubiquitous bugs in exception based error handling)
Powerful because they support map, flatmap, applicative etc, making it easy to eg chain multiple computations together in desired ways, which is unwieldy and bug prone when using exceptions.
It could be that, when learning Java, Python and any other language, we learn that methods return objects... and that's that. No weird dedicated syntax and magic, special treatment for returning anything other than the happy path, and the HUGE complexity that comes with it, eg the dedicated syntax itself and how it behaves, differences between checked and unchecked exceptions, hierarchies of exceptions etc etc.
When lists and booleans also implement map, flatMap etc, you can actually reduce syntax of languages even further- there's no need for looping syntax like for, while etc, and no need for if else either. This is probably too extreme for most people, but think about it!