51–60 of 160 posts
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> C with 2 plusses I read it as "C with two pulses"... Which is how I feel about C++ - unnecessarily complicated.
I don't understand the joke you're making. How does "pulse" equate to complicated?
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I'm surprised that you draw a sharp distinction between C and Pascal syntax. They have a shared lineage and are really very close to each other. Yeah, curly braces won over "begin" and "end", but that's not a matter of some huge conceptual rift, just convenience. There are numerous languages today, including Haskell and Ocaml, that are far more removed from the Algol lineage than these two. Heck, the differences betw…
Historically, the point of writing 'begin' and 'end' instead of using curly braces was mostly support for non-ASCII character sets where the curly braces are not included. It's why C also has an alternate syntax using and COBOL goes as far as writing out arithmetical operators as English text, such as DIVIDE x INTO y GIVING z.
I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…
> But these days folks are mostly used to the C style syntax. And I'm not even arguing that it is a better language than C or others. But the whole industry has gone overall into believing that anything newly 'invented' is good and anything that's been around a while is passé Problem of the Pascal syntax is that it prevents adoption of certain constructs, which are just not nice. A few examples - lambda expression: `…
Hmm meh. I have a soft spot for Delphi/Object Pascal but I think the case here is not great. What it looks like at a glance is they wrote a better Pascal program than the Go one it was competing against, rather than just idiomatically port it. A fine approach, but it doesn't tell us that much. Specifically, it doesn't tell us very much about programming languages. Go has plenty of weaknesses versus Pascal, but two co…
"Channels are nice, until they are not. I feel as though it's easier, though not necessarily easy, to write correct programs using mutexes than Go channels in many cases." The rule for mutexes is, never take more than one. As long as you only ever take one, life is pretty good. When all you had was mutexes as your primitive, though, that became a problem. One is not enough. You can't build a big program on mutexes, a…
Ideally the actual rule is, never take a mutex while holding another mutex. You can take multiple mutexes simultaneously if the API supports it. (The problem is the API usually doesn't support it unless you implement the mutexes yourself using lower-level primitives, but that requires not actually using mutexes as your primitive.)
( > the technical rule is always take mutexes in the same order.
As you note, this doesn't actually work in practice, since you've given youself the opprotunity to get the order wrong every single time you do it.)
I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…
> But these days folks are mostly used to the C style syntax. And I'm not even arguing that it is a better language than C or others. But the whole industry has gone overall into believing that anything newly 'invented' is good and anything that's been around a while is passé Problem of the Pascal syntax is that it prevents adoption of certain constructs, which are just not nice. A few examples - lambda expression: `…
I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…
I think this is partially accepted to keep wages down. New languages allow fresh developers to be on a level playing field with more senior developers. Both have say 2 years experience in said new language. Fresh developers are cheaper and therefore push down wages.
“In the race” What a terrible habit we have of speaking about our tools like they’re in competition with each other! I don’t think I’ll ever meet a carpenter who talks about their hammer or even their manual crank drill being “still in yhe race”. Tools have contexts where they might be used. Sometimes one tool will supersede another for all the day’s tasks, but tomorrow’s tasks will be different in unknown ways and w…
>> And... Pascal is still in the race for sure! And what about.. umm... Modula 2/3 or Oberon? They don't gain as much industry attractions as Pascal does, eh?
Wirth went too far with Modula, case sensitivity is a bug, not a feature. He became obsessed with purity, instead of usability. Anders Hejlsberg was the author of the best Pascal implementation, greatly enhancing Pascal until he was seduced by Microsoft and helped start the evil that is .NET and C#. Delphi was great until Borland decided to abandon most of their user base and pursue the corporate market. Lazarus/Free…
Agree; that was the first thing I changed in https://oberon-lang.github.io/; besides the few academic oddities, original Oberon is a much better language than Pascal or Modula.
> He became obsessed with purity, instead of usability
There was definitely an academic bubble; for example, the claim that Oberon is a system language and can only be specified with 16 pages is demonstrably false, especially since there is a lot of code in the Oberon system that can only be implemented at all by means of (partially undocumented) backdoors to the language; unfortunately, these backdoors bypass the compiler's type checking.
> Lazarus/Free pascal is really good, except for the abysmal documentation
Unfortunately, the language is a huge, partly unspecified patchwork, where apparently all sorts of current fashionable constructs have been built in, partly even redundantly. The resulting complexity is hardly manageable with the present development approach.
“In the race” What a terrible habit we have of speaking about our tools like they’re in competition with each other! I don’t think I’ll ever meet a carpenter who talks about their hammer or even their manual crank drill being “still in yhe race”. Tools have contexts where they might be used. Sometimes one tool will supersede another for all the day’s tasks, but tomorrow’s tasks will be different in unknown ways and w…
programming languages (and some other categories of software used to create things) depend strongly on having an active user and developer base, because the range of things that people want to do with them keeps changing and growing. so in that sense there is a competition for mindshare, and languages that don't "keep up" get an increasingly large list of things that you can't use them for because no one has written…
Standing up an established language in one of these runtimes is an upper division college level project. If you strongly felt that Algol was the clearest or most inspiring way to express your project, it’s not nearly so out of reach as it was a few decades ago.
That’s exactly why we’ve had this cambrian explosion of new and revived languages lately.
There’s a lot of assumptions and bias in here.