<story><title>Programming Languages Are Simply Not Powerful Enough</title><url>http://ivanjovanovic.com/2012/04/26/programming-languages-are-simply-not-powerful-enough/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>The popularity of programming languages is entirely a matter of historical accident. C flourished while Pascal languished because UNIX was written in C. Was there really a deep technical reason for preferring C to Pascal? No, not really. Indeed, for most of early history, Pascal had far superior tooling to C.&lt;p&gt;How else do you explain the popularity of languages like Javascript and Objective-C? Javascript is an objectively terrible language, hacked together by Brendan Eich in an afternoon. Yet, it&apos;s a tremendously popular language, and tremendous amounts of money and time have gone into building good tooling for it. Same thing with Objective-C. It&apos;s a shitty, ad-hoc, cobbled-together patchwork of C and Smalltalk, yet it&apos;s tremendously popular now because that&apos;s what the iPad is programmed in.</text></item><item><author>cageface</author><text>The claim is often made that languages like Forth and Scheme are better for building applications than less elegant and orthogonal languages. But the evidence on the ground is overwhelmingly to the contrary. The vast majority of commercially significant apps are built in relatively baroque and ugly languages like Java and C++.&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that the ability to define your own language constructs is ultimately a lot less useful than things like rich libraries and robust tooling and I&apos;m still waiting to see real-world proof of the advantages of programmable programming languages.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bad_user</author><text>Pascal (or more precisely Borland&apos;s version of it) was my first programming language that I learned in school. I also used it when I was participating in the CS Olympiads.&lt;p&gt;Going from Pascal to C was like a breath of fresh air. Pascal is like a combination of everything I hate in all programming languages that I know and I&apos;m glad that the world moved on. C is small, elegant and portable. It&apos;s a systems programming language that does what it&apos;s supposed to do.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; &lt;i&gt;Javascript is an objectively terrible language&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our tastes are different and all proof to the contrary, as Javascript proved that it&apos;s an &lt;i&gt;objectively&lt;/i&gt; good programming language, that has been burdened with legacy, incompatibilities due to the browser wars and more recently slow evolution due to its huge popularity and the stagnation of IExplorer. It has quirks and it isn&apos;t what it should have been, but considering the context it&apos;s the best outcome we could have had.&lt;p&gt;Name one other programming language that&apos;s (1) a true standard governed by a standards body with multiple platform-independent implementations and (2) has less problems than Javascript.&lt;p&gt;With Javascript your argument falls flat on its head too, because all of the competing technologies failed because of really good technical and political reasons ... lets not forget VBScript, Java Applets, Flash and Silverlight. Yes, technologically speaking Javascript was and is better than all of them.</text></comment>
<story><title>Programming Languages Are Simply Not Powerful Enough</title><url>http://ivanjovanovic.com/2012/04/26/programming-languages-are-simply-not-powerful-enough/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>The popularity of programming languages is entirely a matter of historical accident. C flourished while Pascal languished because UNIX was written in C. Was there really a deep technical reason for preferring C to Pascal? No, not really. Indeed, for most of early history, Pascal had far superior tooling to C.&lt;p&gt;How else do you explain the popularity of languages like Javascript and Objective-C? Javascript is an objectively terrible language, hacked together by Brendan Eich in an afternoon. Yet, it&apos;s a tremendously popular language, and tremendous amounts of money and time have gone into building good tooling for it. Same thing with Objective-C. It&apos;s a shitty, ad-hoc, cobbled-together patchwork of C and Smalltalk, yet it&apos;s tremendously popular now because that&apos;s what the iPad is programmed in.</text></item><item><author>cageface</author><text>The claim is often made that languages like Forth and Scheme are better for building applications than less elegant and orthogonal languages. But the evidence on the ground is overwhelmingly to the contrary. The vast majority of commercially significant apps are built in relatively baroque and ugly languages like Java and C++.&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that the ability to define your own language constructs is ultimately a lot less useful than things like rich libraries and robust tooling and I&apos;m still waiting to see real-world proof of the advantages of programmable programming languages.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mturmon</author><text>The version of Pascal I learned on (early 1980s) had the problems Kernighan refers to in this piece:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most awfully, &quot;length of the array is part of the type of the array&quot;.  This made some programming rather painful (strings and numerical programming, for example).  Maybe other dialects of that time didn&apos;t have this problem, I don&apos;t know.  I do know I found C to be a great relief.&lt;p&gt;Javascript is a good example of historical accident, on the other hand.  It&apos;s got just enough extensibility that its flaws can be worked around.  But its popularity is not due to its careful design.</text></comment>