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The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

blog.fourthbit.com

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Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#131

Post by dllthomas »

tracker1 wrote: post #128
dllthomas wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, having done a little C#, my impression was "They aimed for 'a better Java' and mostly succeeded."

Mostly? There are very few things Java does better as a language, and most of those are opinion, not outright better. My biggest interest in .Net/CLI/Mono from very early on was how much easier it was to interface with systems libraries vs. Java's JNI.

Given the large surface areas of each, I'd be astounded if there were zero points on which Java is genuinely superior. I don't recall either well enough to give any specifics.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#132

Post by dllthomas »

onli wrote: post #68
xcreature wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, this comment states that Bash is not available in all POSIX. Here is where I get lost. http://blog.fourthbit.com/2014/03/01/the-best-programming-la...

Yes, that is correct. Bash has additional functionality (and the for-loop I showed could very well be a part of that). If you want posix, better stick to dash, the code he showed. But bash with its additional features (like associative arrays) is much more comfortable, so if you know you can use bash - because the target is GNU/Linux - it is a good idea to use them.

Sh has for; it does not have the {a..b} construct. But you can write it as:

    for i in `seq 0 5`; do
        echo "$i"
    done
and that will work perfectly well on dash.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#133

Post by codygman »

CmonDev wrote: post #33

Please check your facts before posting to avoid being a clueless moron: C# is not just a static language it supports dynamic typing, C# is not just an object-oriented language it's a functional language as well. The post is downright offensive to C# developers. EDIT: ok, I figured it out - it's a troll post to stir the HN community a bit. Lot's of other good languages get undeserved bashing.

I disagree that just providing functional constructs makes a language a "functional language". How mutable state, purity, and recursion are handled have quite a bit of say in whether a language is functional.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#134

Post by axaxs »

voidlogic wrote: post #90
greenonion wrote: post #7

Regarding the Go vs. D argument and Google beeing behind Go, Facebook seems to be using D http://www.drdobbs.com/mobile/facebook-adopts-d-language/240...

Sure, but that doesn't mean both organization are equally committed to each language. Google has an entire team that works on Go full time and all their work is donated to golang.org which is opensource. Its not clear that Facebook is more than just a D user at this point. I also have a seeking suspicion that Facebook never considered using Go because of Go's close Google ties, maybe if they didn't feel Google was a…

As I understand it, they didn't 'go with D over Go' so to speak. They employ a fanatic of the language who wrote a piece in D, presumably with approval, and used it. There's nothing wrong with any of that, and I hope it works well for them. But I wouldn't say it was exactly chosen in advance for its merits, other than having an awesome programmer in the language, which can be one of the biggest reasons at times.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#135

Post by Dewie »

overgard wrote: post #5
bromagosa wrote: post #3

«The first true object-oriented language. But it seems to me Smalltalk is pretty much a forgotten language.» Why do so many people kill Smalltalk so fast? I could give so many URLs to illustrate how Smalltalk has a stable and growing community, with so many open projects and people making a living out of it, teaching it in universities and using it for research, but I think these two links sum it all up: http://forum…

> Why do so many people kill Smalltalk so fast? Because it doesn't have curly braces. Entirely unfair, but it seems like if you want to sneak in an innovative language it needs to be a wolf in sheep's clothes. (IE: it need to vaguely resemble C)

Since curly braces are a pain for me to write (on my keyboard), I strongly embrace languages who don't make them part of the important syntax.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#137

Post by thinkpad20 »

sfvisser wrote: post #107
nzonbi wrote: post #80

This was an excellent article. Agree with the author on many points. Some notable mentions: - Scheme: One of the best languages. A shining example of the beauty of simplicity. I personally envy folks that got to learn programming with SICP. Unfortunately, I didn't crossed with the SICP as a kid, when I would probably had devoured it. - Haskell: possibly the most advanced programming language, with the downside of hav…

Haskell too much syntax? That's a very weird claim. Haskell's syntax is one of the leanest around. You could even argue the lack of syntax can be confusing sometimes. Beginners often mix up types, patterns and expressions, because there isn't a huge syntactic difference.

Yeah, that surprised me as well. There are declarations of types and classes etc which are a bit confusing at first, and then there are `do` and `case` and the like. Certainly not a lot though, compared to say C++ or Scala. I think what might make it appear more difficult is that it's just so different from almost anything else out there, so it's not just that there's a bit of new syntax to learn, but that almost nothing that you've learned in other languages will be applicable.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#138

Post by evincarofautumn »

delluminatus wrote: post #123
sfvisser wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell too much syntax? That's a very weird claim. Haskell's syntax is one of the leanest around. You could even argue the lack of syntax can be confusing sometimes. Beginners often mix up types, patterns and expressions, because there isn't a huge syntactic difference.

He means that Haskell has a lot of operators. Haskell code is often very symbol-heavy instead of word-heavy, which IMO can make it hard to read. It reminds me of Perl in that way.

Yeah, but those operators are defined by libraries. There is very little built into to the language. Perl is exactly the opposite.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#139

Post by GhotiFish »

coldtea wrote: post #102
GhotiFish wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well isn't that a cute dilemma. You're either an idiot, which means you won't understand it and shouldn't criticize, or you're not an idiot and your lack of understanding is an effective criticism. Reminds me of Haskell. Personally, I'm of the view that the planet is populated by humans, and you have to work with them, and C++'s arcane tome of a standard is perhaps a hostile environment for such creatures.

> Personally, I'm of the view that the planet is populated by humans, and you have to work with them, and C++'s arcane tome of a standard is perhaps a hostile environment for such creatures. I don't know, everybody who's doing serious commercial programming seems to doing OK with C++, for stuff from Photoshop to Premiere, and from MS Office to AAA games and super stable and fast multimedia apps, like Cubase, Studio O…

yes, I know. Though just because it's standard doesn't make it good.

It does offer good job security, however.

Re: The Best Programming Language (or How to Stop Worrying and Love the Code)

#140

Post by GhotiFish »

vapourismo wrote: post #77
GhotiFish wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well isn't that a cute dilemma. You're either an idiot, which means you won't understand it and shouldn't criticize, or you're not an idiot and your lack of understanding is an effective criticism. Reminds me of Haskell. Personally, I'm of the view that the planet is populated by humans, and you have to work with them, and C++'s arcane tome of a standard is perhaps a hostile environment for such creatures.

May I have fries with that?

I'm sure that comment meant something. I have no idea what.
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