Tell us why your language sucks

http://www.drmaciver.com/2008/02/tell-us-why-your-language-sucks/

by floater • 17 years ago

9 3 17 years ago

nailer• 17 years ago

Python: for the reasons mentioned in the article, but also the frequent release changes. There's great stuff in 2.6 like Queue objects but 2.4 is always installed.

Also unlike Perl and Java, there's still no tool that converts custom formats to native OS packaging.

And the colon on the end of function declarations serves no purpose.

tom_b• 17 years ago

SQL: Requires your vendor to wrap in basic programming constructs or wrapping the SQL yourself in the code of your choice.

No ability to create dynamic functions on the fly. Why can't I do something like:

SELECT something, {some custom function here()} FROM sometable GROUP BY something

I almost want something macro like in there. I previously worked on apps that had fluid, ever-changing business rules. Where you might read in several range values to check some other set of values for inclusion in that range, count the values in the range, or average them, or check them for thresholds, etc. In Oracle, you can easily write your own custom grouping function, but you can't do it on the fly. I probably should have written the code to dynamically parse the intended SQL and build the dynamic SQL and custom function on the fly. Live and learn.

Analytic function windowing. Every time, I have to re-grok exactly how to do it properly.

Hierarchies. SQL sucks for doing this simply. I've used proprietary stuff (CONNECT BY in Oracle) and built my own nested set models as well. Both are fun technically and work, but are hell to support - during code reviews and sessions I see the eyes start to glaze over whenever I've dealt with hierarchies in SQL.

garnet7• 17 years ago

I think "T"'s comments on the Python community are depressingly close to the truth.

It is very easy to find pythonistas on python-list who are eager to tell you how wrong you are, or how you shouldn't even want to do <X> because it's not "pythonic".

I think Yegge was right, and that this is the main thing holding Python back.

That said, I still generally like the language itself.

Tell us why your language sucks

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