Can we stop the language bashing please ?

http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/stop-the-language-bashing-please

by jacquesm • 17 years ago

70 111 17 years ago

pierrefar3• 17 years ago

All good points.

As a PHP-only hacker (wouldn't say fan), I am always amused with the PHP bashing. It's missing this or that. It does x wrong. Yet it only powers Facebook. It is the only language where I can be up and coding in no time to produce complex web apps quickly.

Language users always underestimate the second point: personal familiarity is a great productivity boom that no other language can match. Better the devil you know...

And a similar argument holds for databases, but it's a bit more complicated for that one.

nostrademons3• 17 years ago

"As a PHP-only hacker...personal familiarity is a great productivity boom that no other language can match. Better the devil you know..."

It's possible to become personally familiar with more than one language. Get to know many devils. ;-)

Learning a new language always feels like a pain when you're doing it, because everything's 10x slower than with your old language. But then you become familiar with the new one, and can write two languages at full speed instead of one, and the pain of learning it is quickly forgotten. Moreover, it gives you perspective on both the old and the new that can be quite valuable.

Do this enough and eventually you realize that there're some languages that are just bad. But it's very much worth examining their history and understanding how they became bad. Because I can guarantee that it wasn't because their designers were stupid, and the same forces that make a language go bad tend to make any software project go bad. If you're aware of them, you might keep your software project from going bad, at least for a while.

pierrefar3• 17 years ago

I do learn other languages. Right now I'm focusing on the non-alphanumeric soup we call Erlang. I can also (just) barely do some Python, and Node.js is next on the list.

For PHP, it's best to think of it as an inconsistent wrapper around lots of other libraries. In most instances, I know there is a function to do what I want, and a quick lookup gets me the right syntax.

jpr• 17 years ago

I'll stop bashing languages as soon as they stop being insultingly bad. For many languages that would mean death. I'm okay with that.

nostrademons3• 17 years ago

Things from PHP that I want in Django and Rails:

- "Just write an HTML file" deployment. I want to be able to dump an HTML file into a directory to get started, with none of this skeleton directory stuff. Then I could incrementally refactor that file into a template, pull its logic into views and models, customize the paths with a urls.py, and build my app up with baby steps instead of jumping into MVC land immediately.

- Tight integration with webservers. This FCGI/SCGI standalone stuff is a pain, particularly if I also want to serve static files. I want to start with something transparent like PHP's Apache module and then go to FCGI/SCGI/proxying only if I get big enough to add a separate appserver.

- User comments on the documentation. They're occasionally misleading, but usually explain some necessary corner cases.

Things from Java I want in Python:

- A fast JIT compiler.

- JavaDoc. Yes, it's superior to docstrings, mostly because there's a standardized documentation generator for Java and basically all Java projects use it. When I look at a Python project, I have no idea what documentation format they're going to use.

Things from Erlang I want in every language:

- Message-passing concurrency. It's time to ditch threads.

- "Let it crash" mentality. It's virtually impossible to enumerate the ways which your program may fail, so let it die and focus on what you should do to recover from the failure. Then use a supervisor process to make that happen.

Things from Python I want in every language:

- Whitespace-significant syntax. Controversial I know, but I find this drastically reduces clutter in code.

- Doctests. I don't think Python goes far enough; its philosophy is that doctests are documentation and unittests are tests. But with a couple simple extensions, doctests could be tests too, and much more concise, readable, easy tests than the xUnit framework provides.

There're a bunch more I could come up with, but this is already a long post...

jules• 17 years ago

I would like syntax highlighting for my doctests.

andreyf• 17 years ago

With the >>>'s color dependent on whether the test passes.

cellis• 17 years ago

As a new php -> python programmer here are a couple other things i'd naively like to add to python:

Built in json_encode.

Type hinting

The only reason i decided to learn python was because of the free quotas on the google app engine. I suppose I'm still kind of reeling from the triple whammy of having to learn Django (ok, its not really hard), Python, and the google app engine with its non-relational db all at once. Unlearning relational stuff is much harder than it looks.

nostrademons3• 17 years ago

Python 2.5 ships with simplejson, and in Python 2.6 it's been renamed to plain old json. I'm not sure on the implementation - one of the problems with Python JSON implementations was fragmentation, so if you wanted the standard implementation you'd use simplejson, but if you wanted the fast one you'd use cjson, yet if you wanted the maximally compatible library there was yet another 3rd-party JSON library. I'd like to think that the json module is fast and standards compliant, but I haven't looked at it.

I kinda would like type hinting too, although that's a deeply divisive issue in a dynamic language community.

itistoday• 17 years ago

If you're interested in a Lisp-based PHP-like web framework, I've been working on one called Dragonfly for newLISP (http://www.rundragonfly.com), which has some of the things you asked for like a standard doc format and thread-less message-passing concurrency, as well as "just write an HTML file" development.

One of my favorite things about PHP though is its documentation, which as you point out allows for user comments. That is something that I would like to see more widespread (and something that Dragonfly unfortunately lacks).

I agree with the sentiment of the OP: there are many languages out there, and they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. I also don't thing you'll ever find a language that will please everyone, so say 'no' to language monogamy and pick the one best suited to the task at hand.

10ren• 17 years ago

Fantastic points! Request for a bunch more, written up.

http://www.sinatrarb.com/ at least does it with one file (but it's not HTML, which I agree is a lower on-ramp).

User comments on docs is brilliant. Flash does this, but moderated, with a long delay (weeks!). So, a reddit/digg/HN/SO voting scheme would fix this. But I agree, that just plain comment - unvoted, unmoderated - would still be a net win.

Javadocs is assisted by strong typing. A huge win is hyperlinks for return types and arguments, so you can quickly trace through. A doc-only type-system convention for python would help here. There's also that extreme approach in Haskell of looking up functions entirely by their type signatures.

"Let it crash" is cool, but makes sense only for servers, I think. It's moving away from a general purpose language to a specific application. But it's an important one, so why not? I mention this just because it's a bit mind-twisting.

EDIT doctest was new to me, and that's fantastic too. http://docs.python.org/library/doctest.html Years ago, I had the idea of writing unit tests automatically, by capturing the output of a manual test session, and then using it directly as an automated test: so that you get it 100% for free, since you do the work anyway. I didn't realize that python's REPL makes this trivial (uh... so lisp has probably been doing this for 30 years...); and pasting it in the code itself is another cool improvement. It still has the problem of unit tests, of freezing the API; but if you change it, you'll want to test it again anyway. Hey, if you refactor the code, you can probably refactor the REPL session at the same time.

As I said: fantastic, request for a bunch more.

simonw2• 17 years ago

Can we stop using the term "bashing"?

jacquesm25• 17 years ago

Apologies, non-native English writer/speaker here, what term would you prefer?

simonw2• 17 years ago

I'm trying to think of one. A better alternative might be "criticism", but "Can we stop the language criticism please?" seems like an obviously wrong question - without criticism, how do we know what's bad?

"Bashing" kind of suggests "criticism for the sake of being unpleasant". How about "non-constructive criticism"?

I can't quite explain what it is about the term "bashing" that I find annoying, but I think it's the assumption it seems to make that the criticism in question isn't well reasoned.

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

I do not see anything inappropriate about use of term "bashing" - which I take as meaning, "to criticize in an UNcontructive manner," perhaps with a hostile, degrading tone.

Hopefully the comment he made was intended to be a parody of your title or otherwise humorous.

pvg4• 17 years ago

I honestly hope people don't stop language bashing or really anything-bashing. Strident advocacy can be insightful, amusing and food for thought. Done well, it's also more interesting to read than measured bloodless arguments carefully constructed to conform to the Interplanetary Disagreement Protocol version 7.A. I'm always perplexed that in the face of the avalanche of writing about 'passionate users', there are many who put tremendous value on technical communication that's as dull as robotically possible.

jacquesm25• 17 years ago

There are plenty of ways to show your disagreement and juvenile rants only serve to vent the spleen, nobody is going to come away from an exchange like that with a changed mind, in fact they might start to associate the tool of choice of the 'ranter' with the ranters behaviour.

Real Programmers (TM) can do their work in any environment, they will have their preferences but for the most part they'll be language agnostic because they have learned over the years that the tool is less important than he or she that wields it.

I realize this goes against the grain here, PG is very strongly of the opinion that the tools matter a great deal, but I've seen mediocre people with great tools fail miserably and I've seen people with nothing but edlin and an assembler written in BASIC (of all things) make a small fortune by building some very elegant stuff.

The more interesting fact about this bashing is that the closer the languages are to each other the more fanatical the bashing.

A python programmer will not get nearly as excited about some perceived shortcoming in COBOL as they'll get about one in perl or php because those languages are being used in the same 'domain' that python is used in (for the record, Python advocates are amongst the ones doing the best job for their language of all the ones named here).

pvg4• 17 years ago

I think the assumption that all writing is or should be an attempt to change someone's mind is misplaced. Despite the contortions to equate it to high art or some form of self-actualization, programming is mostly work and work, along with its rewards, involves a fair amount of frustration. Writing and reading about those experiences can be quite interesting and informative and the spleen vented also serves as good reminder not to take oneself (and one's tools) excessively seriously. Tastes vary but I know I'd rather read, say, a chapter in the Unix Haters Handbook than yet another wide-eyed post about the inimitable ecstasy of being within 12 feet of a Rails app.

plinkplonk3• 17 years ago

I agree with your (Jacques's) larger point, but I think this is a bit of a mountain out of a molehill especially this bit - "It's just a good old hanging party in disguise." Really? .

Every community in the world has fierce discussions about the comparative merits and demerits of the various tools used.

I know martial artists who have fierce debates about which martial art styles are "best" while agreeing that it is the fighter not the style that is ultimately important.

I disagree with this bit of your argument too.

"Real Programmers (TM) can do their work in any environment, they will have their preferences but for the most part they'll be language agnostic because they have learned over the years that the tool is less important than he or she that wields it."

The best programmers I know are not language agnostic at all. They have marked language preferences to the point where they will go out of the way to work with the "best" languages they know. The tool is less important than the wielder, sure but the best wielders try very hard to use the best tools, which is hardly "agnostic".

If this were true, PG could have written HN in PHP. PHP is perfectly adequate for the functionality of HN. The best programmers go for their preferred tools (to the point of buildig new ones if necessary) rather than "agnostically" select whatever will do the job. I suspect COBOL would "suffice" for most business apps, for e.g. and perl for most web apps. If one thinks all langauges are "equal" ins some abstract sense, why bother inventing new ones.

Now if you are saying that one shouldn't actively going about criticizing/putting down other people (as distinct from the languages/tools/ etc they use), than I agree. I hope we never come to a politically correct era where all of us mumble pious homilies about how all languages are Turing Equivalent etc.

All that said, I think your frame of "features from other languages that i would like in my favorite language" is brilliant. Good thinking.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

"Real Programmers (TM)"

Maybe not everybody aspires to being a "real programmer", if that means merely being a tool that other people (MBAs) wield at their fancy. Those unreal programmers might have other desires, like working on beautiful things or in an aesthetically pleasing environment.

drothlis• 17 years ago

I love the great despisers, for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other bank.

--Nietzsche (Thus spoke Zarathustra)

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

fuck german. umlauts? REALLY?!

axod14• 17 years ago

People who routinely bash languages likely do so to cover up their own inadequacies and insecurities about their own programming ability.

It's childish and boring.

djcapelis10• 17 years ago

Can we stop the bashing of bashing please?

Bashing serves a useful function. Not all bashing is productive, but just focusing on positive aspects of every language without any critical thought doesn't work. I would agree if you wanted to change your call for more balance and less comments that contain just bashing.

Critical thought and critical analysis requires criticism, it isn't pretty, but that's how things work sometimes.

As a reference, this is some of the more well-written criticism I've seen on languages and its existence makes the Internet a better place: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ (And I say this being rather fond of C++ actually. I disagree with a few of the points made, but I can't deny this is a very nicely laid out critique that bashes C++ in such a comprehensive way it's nothing short of an excellent read.)

jacquesm25• 17 years ago

There is constructive criticism and there is 'bashing', which I mean to read as being one step shy of attacking those people that use something out of choice or need.

The parallel with religion is a strong one: If you criticize something that's great.

If you start to use your criticism to increase your own stature or if you use it to demean others ('real programmers don't use x') then you've gone from criticism to bashing and it serves no purpose.

Just like the catholics and the protestants in Ireland would go out of their way to try to force the others to 'live like they do'.

Just because it's different does not automatically make it wrong. Some people drive Yugos, others drive BMWs or Audis. Arguably they all have their shortcomings and advantages, the market place decides who is 'best' for a particular application and budget.

Constructive criticism is not telling someone the stuff they use sucks because yours is better, it is telling someone what good things you can do with your toolset. Then you can objectively compare the two and you'll most likely end up somewhere in the middle.

The typical basher has already made up his mind beforehand, and will not move a micron to middle ground.

As soon as you start to make arguments like everybody should use X because everybody knows Y sucks (with or without specifics) it is no longer constructive.

If your stuff is hot shit then do something awesome with it and tell me about it.

That's a thousand times more powerful and productive as an argument than any kind of explicit or implied criticism will ever be accompanied by a 'drop what you're using' advice, especially if it comes packaged in the typical internet rant.

djcapelis10• 17 years ago

Please tell me exactly where the line is between bashing and criticism and then get the entire world to agree with it.

I agree with you that there's a lot of bad criticism out there, but you draw a distinction where none exists and overall your critique of criticism was did nothing to address fundamental issues.

pg's disagreement hierarchy posted on here every couple of seconds is a much more thorough call towards constructive criticism and actually provides workable and useful advice. Here you're just going off and saying "wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have evil X in the world?"

Sure, it would be nice if it was more civil. Did you want to actually make any real suggestions on how to bring that about? Going off and criticizing all criticism and rambling on about how we should all just focus on the positive attributes of all the languages we discuss is just downright lazy and populist.

axod14• 17 years ago

The point is, it doesn't really matter. Can you imagine a forum on poetry forever debating which is the better language french/german/english?

weavejester9• 17 years ago

Natural languages and programming languages are two very different things. The choice of natural language usually doesn't make a huge difference to the length and quality of a sentence. Conversely, the choice of programming language can make a very big difference.

djcapelis10• 17 years ago

Did you read the FQA I linked?

That type of thing does actually matter, allows people to avoid, or think twice about using certain language features and imparts a vast amount of wisdom to anyone wondering about some of the dark sides of C++'s design. C++ made some very interesting headway in terms of language design and we can all learn from the areas where things didn't work out quite as intended.

Since some people (maybe not you) actually make new languages and rely on this type of discuss to help them create better languages in the future, it's absolutely vital that such criticism continues.

Can you imagine a world where we were all stuck with COBOL, ALGOL and ADA because no one bothered to write any criticism outlining the areas where these languages weren't sufficient? Are you really claiming that everything from http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EW... to http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html is all useless nonsense that helps no one?

madd_o2• 17 years ago

Someone bashes php or Java, and, well I can understand that, but how dare you bash language bashing!

Joking aside, bravo for the denunciation, there's no best language, there's no worst language, they're tools in a box, the sooner we accept it the better.

davidw2• 17 years ago

They are not just 'tools in a box', though, that's a bad metaphor. Each language is a more or less complete toolbox, although each one has things it's better at. Still, most of us tend to grab the language(s) we know, first, rather than look around for the 'perfect' language for each job, unless it's going to be a very large project.

jacquesm25• 17 years ago

Exactly, it is all about economy. If the price of change is too large we'll stick with what we know already.

If the price of change starts to look like it might be made up for over the course of a project then that's an excellent incentive to switch to something more suitable.

madd_o2• 17 years ago

Let's accept your argument, that each language is a complete toolbox. You'd likely grab a different toolbox to fix different classes of problems.

For large problems it's common to bring several different toolboxes (think of a primarily php site with a their public api scratched out in java).

The points among each language which contrast and define the 'things it's better at' differentiate the tools and or toolboxes (however you prefer to think of each).

Again, +1 for tearing down tearing down programming languages.

weavejester9• 17 years ago

But not all tools are equal. Some programming languages are a lot better than others.

michaelneale2• 17 years ago

better still, stop binding yourself to a language - there are no Python programmers, or Java programmers - there are programmers that use the respective language (at that time).

That kind of blunts any personal attack. There are however communities, so I guess that is what people could attack, for better or worse. But its not personal.

amitt• 17 years ago

This is exactly the type of mentality we employ when trying to hire folks for the FarmVille team. We tell our recruiters to put job descriptions out for "Software Engineers" versus "Flash Developers" and "PHP Developers".

For us, it's rare to find someone with both PHP and Flash experience. Heck, most of the senior devs have less than 2 years experience using both at the same time. So, instead, we look for really smart programmers with solid software engineering fundamentals since we figure that it's much easier to teach a smart person a new language than try to teach someone core CS concepts.

We've seen this work fairly well with several new hires. The language is, like you said, just a medium and changes depending on the project. The real challenge comes from understanding how to architect code in a way that's flexible/scalable/maintainable.

michaelneale2• 17 years ago

Ideally people would have used/shown interest in a reasonable spectrum of languages. And most tools in common use (common being the key word !) really should only take an afternoon to learn enough to get something done, however small. I am not sure why more interviews aren't done like that, but I guess hard to scale.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

I actually like language comparisons. Since I can not be a master of all languages myself, I find it interesting to see what features people value about "their" language and what different languages have to offer.

Also, it is not just senseless bashing. If I invest in learning language X, of course I have an interest in X becoming popular to protect my investment and make it more valuable. Unless you can take that aspect magically away, I don't see how language wars could realistically go away.

berntb• 17 years ago

>>I actually like language comparisons.

Comparision != Bashing;

(And yes, there is some overlap. Please no long word definition "discussions", either :-)

yannis• 17 years ago

Site seems broken down (shows me std Drupal help for can't connect to database and points to install.php)

Something went wrong? Slashdot effect?

jacquesm25• 17 years ago

Not sure why you got voted down for that, Rob, the sysadmin chose just that moment to reboot the box and you caught it before the db was up again, so it definitely was down for a moment.

It's funny, I rarely submit stuff from my own site to HN, of course that coincides with switching the server to a different phase.

bonsaitree• 17 years ago

In short, no.

Granted, it's on the extreme end of high-noise/opinion scale, but "Bashing" is a natural component of the many evolutionary pressures exerted on any form of human memetic expression.

It's no different than literary or other forms of artistic criticism.

Be wary of ANY single idea or concrete instance of expression without a robust spectrum of discussion surrounding its merits.

zitterbewegung• 17 years ago

Why aren't programmers more pragmatic? I like lisp better than any other language but if there is a better solution in another language then I will try to either learn it or use it. Why can't programmers see that languages are tools to be used and not fight if one tool is used over the other. You don't necessarily see this with other craftspeople when they create things. I don't see people arguing over hammers and if you did it sounds really stupid.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

>I don't see people arguing over hammers

I don't think the analogy makes sense here. Unlike programming languages, there's little operational difference between one brand of hammer and another. Maybe brand X is known to last longer than brand Y, but they will still be more or less identical in daily use (aim, swing, get thumb out of way).

jacquesm25• 17 years ago

Actually I know a carpenter that would probably murder you if you took away his 'Estwing'.

So even in hammers there is apparently distinction enough to get people very attached to their tools.

And don't get a woodworker started about their chisels either.

dagw• 17 years ago

All craftspeople argue about tools. Be it sewing machines, chisels, knives, scissors, paints, brushes and just about anything else you can think of. Everybody has their favourite brand and design. The reason you don't see it is probably because you don't hang out at the right (online and offline) forums.

Zak• 17 years ago

Hacking is one of the few art forms where the medium is itself an example of the art. It is natural for good artists to be passionate about their art; to love and hate certain examples of it. Working constantly with those examples is sure to amplify such feelings.

jcl2• 17 years ago

Every language, including the most vile but still Turing complete abomination (I'm looking at you, mumps) has something that we can all learn from and something that is worth singling out for admiration.

The article might be more convincing if it didn't go out of its way to bash a language. :)

jacquesm25• 17 years ago

Yes, there was some mention of my 'hypochrisy' and 'language bias' in the comments.

I highly doubt those have as much experience as I do with mumps (long story) so I'll just ignore them.

As I noted above you have to really know something before you can properly hate it.

jcl2• 17 years ago

In which case, your request becomes "Can we stop the language bashing, unless you really know how bad the language is?"

Which, of course, is useless. You might as well write an article asking people to stop writing uninformed articles. If someone writes, either he believes himself to be adequately informed or he doesn't care that he is uninformed, and in neither case will he be dissuaded by such advice.

zikzikzik• 17 years ago

"in actual fact the criticism is uniformly negative, usually quite childish and un-actionable, one step shy of a value statement about the users of those languages.

It's just a good old hanging party in disguise."

The problem is, I FULLY agree with EVERY aspect of EVERY php bashing (ok, almost), even though I use this language daily, and have been using it for almost 10 years now. ( :S )

The point is, the original implication, that Perl or Python or Ruby or whatever other languange fanatics fabricate or like these php bashing posts, is completely false. If I had a blog, I could have hundreds of php bashing posts, because over 10 years of php usage you encounter a number of mayor WTFs (believe me ;) and you REALLY hate them.

I don't take it as a personal insult at all, and noone should. Ofc I'm not a php-only programmer, but maybe noone should be? Maybe if someone is offended by a bashing of his/her favorite language, it's time to reevaluate some personal issues about self esteem? Or if someone is a somelang-only programmer, then maybe a broadening of skillset (by other languages) is advisable anyway?

lacrossegm• 17 years ago

You cannot fix something that you don't know is broken. Programming languages can have flaws just like anything else. Unless someone points them out they'll never be fixed.

The idea that there is a single perfect language for doing everything is a myth. We need a variety of languages in our toolkit. They can be improved if there is constructive criticism, someone to listen and innovate changes.

omouse• 17 years ago

Language bashing = pointing out flaws in notation. If you think of programming as math, then you need the best notation so that you can solve your problem more easily.

It's unfortunate that language creation with custom syntax isn't easy.

Can we stop the language bashing please ?

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