Re:Programming languages, operating systems, despair and ang...
by AceJohnny2 on Monday June 30, 2014 @02:19PM
(#7966614)
Bah humbug. It looks like the author is hoping for some fantasy world where perfect programming languages would instantaneously be created and be used by everyone.
It looks like he either hasn't read, doesn't understand, or won't accept the conclusions of Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)
He complains multiple times that languages are written for compilers first and programmers second. Yes, if you want good language adoption, the first step is that tools must be readily available and not get in the way of work. If you make your language hard to write a good compiler for it, you're increasing the cost (and thus availability) of the tool, and decreasing number of implementations. "I'm sorry, $LANG can't be used on Mac because no-one wrote a compiler for it yet."
I also take issue with "programmers have become plumbers and documentation archeologists, which is sad and uninteresting". Granted, I'm probably unaware of language/systems where the programmer is magically cognizant of available libraries(/modules/packages/whatever), their API and their use. But in the world I live in, I see this as unavoidable.
...I could go on, but the rest doesn't seem to get any better and I don't want to spend more time arguing the issue(s).
It looks like he either hasn't read, doesn't understand, or won't accept the conclusions of Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)
He complains multiple times that languages are written for compilers first and programmers second. Yes, if you want good language adoption, the first step is that tools must be readily available and not get in the way of work. If you make your language hard to write a good compiler for it, you're increasing the cost (and thus availability) of the tool, and decreasing number of implementations. "I'm sorry, $LANG can't be used on Mac because no-one wrote a compiler for it yet."
I also take issue with "programmers have become plumbers and documentation archeologists, which is sad and uninteresting". Granted, I'm probably unaware of language/systems where the programmer is magically cognizant of available libraries(/modules/packages/whatever), their API and their use. But in the world I live in, I see this as unavoidable.
...I could go on, but the rest doesn't seem to get any better and I don't want to spend more time arguing the issue(s).