I’ve been catching up on my reading, internet reading that is. And I notice that I had a lot of tabs open re: computer languages. One thing I notice that’s quite interesting is that a number of people are starting to make comments regarding various languages akin to my long-standing beliefs.
- Java: I’ve felt that Java is the new COBOL for a couple of reasons. O’Reilly’s State of Java describes one side of it. The other is the fact that Java is massively verbose. Writing something simple reminds me of writing something in COBOL. You spend an inordinate amount of time to even get the language to spit out “Hello World”. It’s sad. I love VM-based languages, I just think a C-like language is not the way to go.
- Perl: You can enjoy Working Daze’s cartoon (see below) to appreciate that I believe Perl is today’s APL. Cryptic and difficult to comprehend a short while later, but oh so powerful. I stay away from it.
- Lisp: I find Common Lisp too large and bulky. I prefer the elegance of Scheme, but Scheme lacks the rich libraries required for a fully useful language. It’s nearly 90% there, but that 10% — mostly network libraries — are required to get that last little bit. I personally wish that they’d simply deprecate Common Lisp and start over with Scheme. Pipe dream to be sure. Mr. Perl, Larry Wall, seems to mention Lisp regularly including this comment: “By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals. And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.” You can read his comments on Lisp and more here: Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting…. You should also read Dan Weinreb’s posts on his blog, especially his . Dan’s ex-Symbolics, a machine I loved using even though ZetaLisp was every bit as complicated as Common Lisp, the environment lessened that hassle. Oh how I wish I could get a VMware-enabled VM with something like the Symbolics system built in. That’d be cool.
- Ruby & Python: I like both of these languages but prefer Python, mostly due to the restrictive nature of the indentation rules which I find liberating and logical. Both claim to be aiming for Lisp but neither comes close enough in my opinion, mostly because of a lack of data=code capability. In fact, I’m simply not smart enough to figure out how to do a data=code type of language unless it looks like Lisp. Maybe it’s the fact I’m a huge Lisp fan. Oh well.
- C: I still like C. Yeah, I’m an old coot. I hate C++. It’s an ugly language. If you’re going to code in an object-oriented C dialect choose Objective-C or Java. Personally I’d opt for Java if I was forced into a C-based object oriented language.
- Smalltalk: I always liked Smalltalk but found the absence of code=data and a true lambda function irritating. I’m a hardcore functional programming guy and Lisp remains the one true language to me. I keep hoping to find a more elegant, simpler language and hoped Smalltalk was it. It wasn’t.
There are a lot of other languages that I’ve been reading up on, but those keep coming up.
The diagram below is from the article in American Scientist by Brian Hayes titled The Semicolon Wars. It is a great chronology of (select) programming languages. I’ve used all of those languages save for Miranda and B.
