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Why study programming languages (2022)

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Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#101

Post by bluGill »

binaryturtle wrote: post #21
shevy-java wrote: post #20

Old languages died or are barely in use anymore. I think it is more interesting to see which languages are still used today and how popular these are. Because this is also tied to the human user/developer. For instance, I used BASIC when I was young - not as a professional but as a hobbyist. I liked it too. I wouldn't use BASIC today because it would be entirely useless and inefficient.

But is that a problem of the language itself, or is it just a problem of available toolchains? E.g. if the gcc compiler collection would come with BASIC support and you just could type something like "gbasic -O3 foobar.bas -o foobar" to get a properly optimised executable out of your BASIC source code file then some may would still use BASIC today, I guess? I started with BASIC too. Also enjoyed BlitzBasic2 for a lon…

Which basic. I remember Atari BASIC - which was a terrible language since the organization was line numbers. Visual BASIC looked a lot nicer the few times I saw it, but I have a total of 10 minutes of my life looking at visual BASIC and so I have no clue how it is in the real world. I do know Visual BASIC was used by a lot of untrained programmers who never learned why we have best practices and so there is a lot of bad BASIC out there - this isn't the fault of the language just the users.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#102

Post by bluGill »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #90
cubefox wrote: post #56

> Why do we design new programming languages? The main answer is that we have only a limited ability to modernize existing programming languages. For example, most languages are not null safe, because most languages are old and we can't make them null safe without breaking backward compatibility with most existing code. And we can't break backward compatibility for practical reasons. So Java will never be null safe,…

It's not just 30 years old. It's 30 years of people building libraries of useful code. If you "modernize" it so that much of that 30 years of work is thrown away, that's really expensive - maybe more expensive than continuing to build on a less-than-perfect foundation. But that turns into the trap of short-term thinking - eventually you reach the point where you would have been better off throwing it away and startin…

That CAN turn into the trap of short term thinking. However if you keep investing in modernizing over time you can get most of the benefits of updated code without having to scrap everything.

The catch is you will also have a bit of old code that cannot be modernized reasonably, and new code has to somehow interoperate with it. Which means languages can't break anything because it might be the one thing you can't figure out how to not use anymore even though you know better and would do it different if you started today. Worse often the problem is an early design decision and so the bad practice is everywhere and you can't get rid of it in any one place because everything depends on it.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#103

Post by btilly »

saghm wrote: post #70
Rochus wrote: post #37

> Usability is similarly ill-defined and hard to measure. Human factors are very well studied and standardized, and there is a well-established discipline called "Human Factors Engineering", which also provides established test and evaluation methods. Human Factors research is considered solid and well-established because it has been built on rigorous experimental psychology and engineering principles developed over…

Honest question: given the relatively niche status of Ada compared to other systems programming languages, and similar diminished levels of popularity for other languages mentioned in this thread (Pascal, Perl), does this really prove that these principles are particularly effective for programming languages? I understand that this is a relatively small sample size, but I feel like that could be just as well used to…

There is a giant https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html phenomena here. The word "good" should never be accepted at face value. It implies a question. Good for what?

ADA was designed with a goal of improving software reliability. Potentially at the cost of other factors, like programming speed. Real life projects using it demonstrated that the error rate of large ADA projects was around half of equivalent C or FORTRAN projects.

However popularity is determined by other factors. Such as personal productivity, and accessibility for novices. These other factors are often in direct opposition to long-term maintainability. It is good for productivity to be able to do things in whatever way is convenient. But that flexibility is a burden for the maintenance programmer. Likewise novices frequently create useful code, which becomes hard to maintain down the line. (Excel spreadsheets are a classic example of this.)

The result is that ADA was a good fit if you have a large project, time to market was not your top issue, and reliability and maintainability were top concerns. Many defense projects have these exact characteristics. Which is why ADA was developed and used there.

But consider a startup. Projects are small. The top concern is time to market. Maintainability will only become an issue if your product launches, gets to market, and succeeds. That's a future problem that can take care of itself.

That's why, when you look at startups, you find a high density of scripting languages. Which language has changed over time. For example Amazon used Perl, Facebook used PHP, and Instagram used Python. But all scripting languages share the similar characteristic of having fast initial development times, and poor long-term maintainability. (Yes, even Python. Internal data showing that is why Google began walking away from Python around 15 years ago.)

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#104

Post by killthebuddha »

The answer to (2) is, IMO, "to make computing cheaper". It's interesting to me that this is not the obvious, default answer (it may not be the most actionable answer but IMO it should at least be noted as a way to frame discussions). I think we're at the tail end of computing's artisanal, pre-industrial era where researchers and programmers alike have this latent, tacit view of computing as a kind of arcana.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#105

Post by btilly »

Rochus wrote: post #58
fuzztester wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is one obvious one, as anyone will realize, if one has read some of Larry Wall's articles about his (and later the team's) motivations for the (syntax and semantics) design decisions they made about the language. For example, in his annual State of The Onion talks, he often discusses these points. They may not have used standards such as the gp comment mentions, but they definitely considered human factors a lot…

Perl presents a fascinating counterexample: Larry Wall, trained as a linguist, explicitly cared about human factors, but his linguistic philosophy produced a language that empirical tests show performs poorly on readability and learnability measures (see e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2534973 or https://doi.org/10.1145/2089155.2089159 ).

I'm sorry, but both of those studies are a joke. They are taking novices who can't program, and are asking them to perform basic programming tasks in languages that they haven't learned. They are essentially testing how steep the initial learning curve is when you first see a language.

A far more important measure is something like function points per month of developer time. See page 49 of https://www.ifpug.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IYSM.-Thirt... for some data on that. ADA 95 did pretty well, around 11. Perl beat it with 15.

Of course that measure isn't perfect. Excel trounced both with over 30. But Excel is only appropriate for some kinds of projects.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#106

Post by ryandv »

cmontella wrote: post #97
ryandv wrote: post #27

Programming languages are obsolete in the LLM era. What current generation AI has revealed is that English is actually the ultimate representation of computer programs and systems, which is both sufficiently terse and precise to economically describe the operation of arbitrarily complex programs. There is no reason to study programming languages in 2025, other than as a historical curiosity - the same way one may stu…

I think it's the exact opposite -- LLMs have revealed the precise utility of programming languages. For decades the "English as programming language" has been the holy grail of language designers. From COBOL to SQL to AppleScript, it was the hope that one day we'll be able to program a computer just as easily as we can instruct a person. Well LLMs finally offer that, and what they are proving is what programmers have…

> natural languages are not only not sufficient for the task of programming,

Downthread there is an example of an ICPC problem statement, [0] given as natural language, (modulo some inequalities and example program inputs/outputs) which was sufficient for Gemini to program & implement the correct solution where no other human could.

[0] https://worldfinals.icpc.global/problems/2025/finals/problem...

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#107

Post by GuB-42 »

1718627440 wrote: post #82
GuB-42 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but ideas are (mostly) worthless. I mean, they are necessary, but that's the easy part, building the technical foundation that make it possible is the hard part. The internet needs wires and routers, distributed computing need a good network (i.e. the internet), current-day AI needs GPUs and GPUs need silicon chips that defy the laws of physics. Really, looking at the EUV lithography process makes all of compute…

As for this measure, Software is worthless as well, which is basically fully specified ideas.

"Fully specified" is the important part here, and the work that went into making the idea fully specified is where the value lies.

For this, we could look at intellectual property laws. Ideas are not protected. Neither by patents, nor copyright, nor trademark. If you want to make your idea worthy with regard to the law, you have to "fully specify" it, turning it into an invention (patent), or code (copyright).

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#108

Post by hinkley »

bdcravens wrote: post #52
hinkley wrote: post #5

Once you understand a thing, you know what it’s capable of. A lot of my early expertise in performance analysis was heavily informed by my SIGPLAN membership. Many of the improvements showing up in compilers and interpreters would show up in some form there, and of course those developers were either involved in the papers or had access to the same research. So when some new version came out with a big explanation of…

> Once you understand a thing, you know what it’s capable of. Did you.... just quote Blade? :-)

I just confessed to reading the paper versions of SIGPLAN, what do you think?

But my favorite will always be

“Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill.”

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#109

Post by cmontella »

ryandv wrote: post #106
cmontella wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the exact opposite -- LLMs have revealed the precise utility of programming languages. For decades the "English as programming language" has been the holy grail of language designers. From COBOL to SQL to AppleScript, it was the hope that one day we'll be able to program a computer just as easily as we can instruct a person. Well LLMs finally offer that, and what they are proving is what programmers have…

> natural languages are not only not sufficient for the task of programming, Downthread there is an example of an ICPC problem statement, [0] given as natural language, (modulo some inequalities and example program inputs/outputs) which was sufficient for Gemini to program & implement the correct solution where no other human could. [0] https://worldfinals.icpc.global/problems/2025/finals/problem...

> problem statement, [0] given as natural language, (modulo some inequalities and example program inputs/outputs)

I also see two graphics, and several formal mathematical expressions. You can't modulo away all the not-natural language and then claim natural language alone was sufficient. I presume these things were added by the authors to increase clarity of the problem statement, and I agree with them. They used formal languages to specify all the important parameters in an unambiguous way, which was the right call! Otherwise we would all be left wondering at the semantics.

Anyway, I don't think this really responds to my point, because competition prompts are designed to be self-contained problem statements that are as clear and unambiguous as possible for competition purposes. And in this case, they switched to speaking in a formal language when being precise and unambiguous was most important.

On the other hand, my statement was about the task of programming, which typically involves solving ill-defined problems with specifications and requirements that shift over time. I've been in programming competitions, I've also been a programmer, and I don't find one to be really related to the other.

Re: Why study programming languages (2022)

#110

Post by mellosouls »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #48
mellosouls wrote: post #15

(2022) This is particularly important here as the essay makes no mention of LLMs or coding agents (which were still in their infancy in development environments; this article is post original copilot/codex but pre ChatGPT).

> This is particularly important here No actually. Why is that important? I dont quite see why that is relevant. Could you elaborate?

In at least two ways, which you might see as alternatively positive and negative wrt whether expertise in programming languages is useful.

Firstly, when using them to create software it's pretty obvious that experienced devs and people who understand theory have a greater ability to guide, curate and control them.

Secondly, as they improve in ability we can see a paradigm change for people using them at least as significant as the jump from assembly to high level languages. Most programmers would have no need to study assembly these days.

Either way, their omission (while appropriate for the year, if somewhat lacking in foresight) is a significant one that renders it somewhat dated already.

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