I'm not trying to say that programmer can't take own decision after a week (or day, or hour) of learning new language. I'm trying to say that "teaching" others with such small experience as 1 week of knowledge is useless. It's not about this article, but in general.
> Note that most code today is written in C, JavaScript, PHP, Java (none of which would win any prizes for theoretical elegance)... rather than ALGOL, ML, Haskell, the various Wirth languages...
ALGOL wasn't actually that bad.
Re:Rust vs. Go
by Turing_Machine on Wednesday January 18, 2017 @05:11PM
(#13430823)
That was long before my time, but from what I've read ALGOL's problems were that it was too complex to be easily implemented on the (very limited) hardware of the time, and a focus on theory to the extent that basic functionality was ignored (even I/O!). That made it great for writing down algorithms on paper, but troublesome if you actually wanted to use it.
Algol 68 was too complex, but Algol 60 was quite good and successful.
The Wirth languages saw fairly widespread use once.
Re:Rust vs. Go
by Turing_Machine on Wednesday January 18, 2017 @05:21PM
(#13430915)
Modula-2 had some uptake, but never to the extent of C or Fortran.
Pascal was popular for teaching at one time, but pure Pascal was never very popular for writing shipping code. If I'm not mistaken, Borland's Turbo Pascal, which was pretty popular, became so by adding non-standard features that probably gave Professor Wirth a heart attack when he heard about them.
C and C++ are also popular by adding non-standard features. Such as, oh, your entire Win32 API, POSIX, and so on: every system's low-level API's, middleware and other stuff.
Re:Rust vs. Go
by Turing_Machine on Saturday January 21, 2017 @02:12PM
(#13451542)
Libraries and the base language syntax (and semantics) are two different things.
Re:Rust vs. Go
by empthought on Wednesday January 18, 2017 @10:26PM
(#13432723)
Delphi is Pascal and was used for tons of things.
- Dreamweaver
- Skype
- TOAD for Oracle
- TeamSpeak
Etc.
Well, unless you want people to actually use your shiny new language. If that's the case, perhaps criticisms of this type should not be dismissed out of hand. :-)
Most programmers are going to abandon something if they study it for a week without significant results. Maybe they'll keep plugging at it if their boss orders them, but they won't do it on their own. Oh, sure, there's a small subset of programmers who enjoy tinkering with weird languages for fun, but that subset is dwarfed by the number of programmers who view languages as a tool for getting things done.
If there's anything that we should learn from the history of programming languages, it's that usability trumps theory every time. The languages that people actually use are almost never the ones that theoreticians admire.
Note that most code today is written in C, JavaScript, PHP, Java (none of which would win any prizes for theoretical elegance)... rather than ALGOL, ML, Haskell, the various Wirth languages...
There's really no comparison. Lisp probably comes closest, in that it is both theoretically elegant and has been used, by the programmer's choice, to build large real-world systems, but even Lisp is basically a rounding error.