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Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

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Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#2

Post by stevenwei »

That post is a little rant heavy but I agree completely: simple, everyday tasks are still way more verbose and require more lines of code than they should in most languages.

Python/Ruby is probably the closest I've seen to a language that provides enough batteries to be productive but gets out of my way syntactically as much as possible, but both of them could use some further evolution.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#3

Post by Bjoern »

While I appreciate the idea and criticisms of the post, I dislike the strong wording of this rant.

I think that designing a language that can solve all possible problems is beside the point. A language is a tool and used for different tasks. Not only is the purpose different but people have also different preferences. So making everybody happy is impossible.

Languages have to go the way of the dodo. Every new one is an arguable attempt to do things better than the one which came before. That doesn't mean they really are better.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#5

Post by defdac »

For those of you finding it hard to read the paranthesis-heavy text, the very last part struck a chord:

"If I have to write one more polyglot bash / awk / python script to gather data from log files on a bunch of different machines, demux that into a time-ordered event stream, pipe it through something to munge it into some slightly different format, ship that off via post to some web address and get some JSON back, parse that into some other shit, do some computation over it like aggregation or date math over time stamps with unlike representations, wrap the results up in an HTML table and send that table in a MIME-enabled e-mail to myself I think I am going to explode."

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#6

Post by loup-vaillant »

Bjoern wrote: post #3

While I appreciate the idea and criticisms of the post, I dislike the strong wording of this rant. I think that designing a language that can solve all possible problems is beside the point. A language is a tool and used for different tasks. Not only is the purpose different but people have also different preferences. So making everybody happy is impossible. Languages have to go the way of the dodo. Every new one is…

Please don't say that "languages are tools". While this is technically right, our thoughts are so dependent on programming languages that they can't be considered "mere" tools. Considering they are make us wrap languages around their implementations, rather than around their users.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#7

Post by berntb »

defdac wrote: post #5

For those of you finding it hard to read the paranthesis-heavy text, the very last part struck a chord: "If I have to write one more polyglot bash / awk / python script to gather data from log files on a bunch of different machines, demux that into a time-ordered event stream, pipe it through something to munge it into some slightly different format, ship that off via post to some web address and get some JSON back,…

CPAN is afaik the gold standard to make that kind of thing bearable. It isn't really a language thing.

(Since everything seems to go to Moose (a backport of most of the Perl 6 OO model) in the Perl world, there might be an impedance mismatch in a few years with old style libraries and new?)

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#8

Post by motters »

Personally, I don't believe that a proliferation of programming languages is really required. Most languages do the same sort of thing with slightly different syntax and degrees of efficiency. If you're really unhappy and frustrated about the current state of programming languages my advice is to go and develop your own.

Re: Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

#9

Post by X-Istence »

stevenwei wrote: post #2

That post is a little rant heavy but I agree completely: simple, everyday tasks are still way more verbose and require more lines of code than they should in most languages. Python/Ruby is probably the closest I've seen to a language that provides enough batteries to be productive but gets out of my way syntactically as much as possible, but both of them could use some further evolution.

I absolutely love Python, can't stand Ruby.

The reason I love Python is that in general when I want to write something a certain way, or what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done. As a programmer it gets out of my way and lets me do what I need to get done.

The author to a certain degree is calling for exactly that, a language that makes tasks that every programmer does over and over extremely simple, make the stuff that is not done nearly as often harder to do, or take up more lines.

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