Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20091109/054578.html

by technikhil • 16 years ago

93 56 16 years ago

stevenwei• 16 years ago

That post is a little rant heavy but I agree completely: simple, everyday tasks are still way more verbose and require more lines of code than they should in most languages.

Python/Ruby is probably the closest I've seen to a language that provides enough batteries to be productive but gets out of my way syntactically as much as possible, but both of them could use some further evolution.

X-Istence2• 16 years ago

I absolutely love Python, can't stand Ruby.

The reason I love Python is that in general when I want to write something a certain way, or what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done. As a programmer it gets out of my way and lets me do what I need to get done.

The author to a certain degree is calling for exactly that, a language that makes tasks that every programmer does over and over extremely simple, make the stuff that is not done nearly as often harder to do, or take up more lines.

nailer4• 16 years ago

> what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done

I love Python too, but it's not without its quirks. Eg:

    ','.join(mylist)

Which nearly everyone I know at first assumed would be:

    list.join(',')

Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.

Bjoern2• 16 years ago

While I appreciate the idea and criticisms of the post, I dislike the strong wording of this rant.

I think that designing a language that can solve all possible problems is beside the point. A language is a tool and used for different tasks. Not only is the purpose different but people have also different preferences. So making everybody happy is impossible.

Languages have to go the way of the dodo. Every new one is an arguable attempt to do things better than the one which came before. That doesn't mean they really are better.

loup-vaillant3• 16 years ago

Please don't say that "languages are tools". While this is technically right, our thoughts are so dependent on programming languages that they can't be considered "mere" tools. Considering they are make us wrap languages around their implementations, rather than around their users.

gaius• 16 years ago

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A hammer is a tool. Therefore "mere" tools can be said to shape ones thoughts.

Bjoern2• 16 years ago

I can understand your point, but I came to the conclusion (after 20+ languages) that thinking in just one language can be quite harmful to find a good solution for a problem.

Actually PG puts it really nicely [1]:

"The right way to solve that problem, I think, is to separate the meaning of a program from the implementation details."

"What program would one like to write? Whatever is least work. Except not quite: whatever would be least work if your ideas about programming weren't already influenced by the languages you're currently used to. Such influence can be so pervasive that it takes a great effort to overcome it. You'd think it would be obvious to creatures as lazy as us how to express a program with the least effort. In fact, our ideas about what's possible tend to be so limited by whatever language we think in that easier formulations of programs seem very surprising. They're something you have to discover, not something you naturally sink into."

http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003940/learn-a-new-langu...

_delirium• 16 years ago

The thread following this post is actually full of surprisingly good discussion; well worth a read for some of the points raised in the back-and-forth.

defdac• 16 years ago

For those of you finding it hard to read the paranthesis-heavy text, the very last part struck a chord:

"If I have to write one more polyglot bash / awk / python script to gather data from log files on a bunch of different machines, demux that into a time-ordered event stream, pipe it through something to munge it into some slightly different format, ship that off via post to some web address and get some JSON back, parse that into some other shit, do some computation over it like aggregation or date math over time stamps with unlike representations, wrap the results up in an HTML table and send that table in a MIME-enabled e-mail to myself I think I am going to explode."

berntb2• 16 years ago

CPAN is afaik the gold standard to make that kind of thing bearable. It isn't really a language thing.

(Since everything seems to go to Moose (a backport of most of the Perl 6 OO model) in the Perl world, there might be an impedance mismatch in a few years with old style libraries and new?)

Diederich• 16 years ago

Moose and standard/old style libraries are entirely and transparently inter-operable.

motters• 16 years ago

Personally, I don't believe that a proliferation of programming languages is really required. Most languages do the same sort of thing with slightly different syntax and degrees of efficiency. If you're really unhappy and frustrated about the current state of programming languages my advice is to go and develop your own.

omaranto• 16 years ago

I think the proliferation of languages is due to people following your advice: they go off to make their own language, realize it's hard to make something radically different and end up just fixing a couple of their pet peeved from another language.

wingo• 16 years ago

If everyone took to heart his "non-starter" characteristics, no one would start anything.

That said, it was a lovely rant ;-)

weavejester• 16 years ago

It seems to me as if he is mostly complaining about the lack of libraries to handle basic operations, rather than programming language syntax or design.

urlwolf• 16 years ago

Which is a problem orders of magnitude easier to solve than designing a language from the ground up.

tzury• 16 years ago

too many new languages introduced in the last decade, no doubt, while most of them are just similar to the others, or simply as bad/boring as the others.

ableal• 16 years ago

Clicky on Carl Sassenrath, the Amiga and Rebol guy: http://www.sassenrath.com/

P.S. good rant on major pain points - I'd toss in the breakage in the hierarchical filesystem model.

agentultra2• 16 years ago

I think he started with a point but devolved into a lot of wishful thinking.

Why not focus on the solution rather than hoping someone is going to listen to you complain and make it all better?

I'm sure they could use the help.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

Wishful thinking? A lot of what he suggests have straightforward implementations as "built-in" features. (Something that looks "built-in" anyhow.)

Perl tried to be pretty much the language he suggests, but it was put together with a poor sense of language design. Ruby tried to correct Perl's mistakes, but also succumbed to the "kitchen sink" mentality. Python tried to correct many earlier mistakes, but while it was more closely integrated with the underlying OS and still managed to be a relatively simple language, it got too tied up in the underlying OS.

Most of what he's talking about could be implemented with Lisp machine or a Smalltalk VM as OS Kernel. The features he wants "built in" could simply be added to the default class library. Perhaps something based on the Erlang VM could satisfy the multi-core part.

agentultra2• 16 years ago

http://www.skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html

The premise as I understand it is that modern languages are broken and have failed to evolve. An interesting point. A good start for an argument.

However, his rant devolves into:

"REAL WORLD, modern datatypes, built-in, literal, batteries-included PLEASE!!! If the following aren't first-class types with first-class literal constructors / representations supported at the language level then your new programming language ISN'T EVEN ON THE PLAYING FIELD"

No evidence. Not even a mention as to how he's reasoned that these statements are true. Nothing.

Why does my compiler/interpreter need to have an "email" data-type? Why is my language not even "on the playing field" without it? Why are there so many successful programming languages then that survive without it?

I can empathise with his frustrations. There are plenty of times on the job when I feel more like a glorified digital plumber. Deserializing/reserializing data and pushing it through various pipes isn't glorious work. But lets take the argument from there rather than flapping our arms and making frantic claims that everything the way it is is inherently broken because it's not the way we'd like it to be.

(And maybe he does just need a good dose of Lisp ;)

aerique• 16 years ago

I thought it was a good rant. It's certainly been a while since I read one like that.

Although I do think he's a little too obsessed with one-liners but that could have been hyperbole on his part.

hga• 16 years ago

""Go" is just another language written first for the compiler and only secondarily for the programmer --- and stuck in a 70s mindset about the relationship of that programmer to the (digital) world within which they live and work!"

AKA the New Jersey design approach lives (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html).

Java is interestingly an at least somewhat successful attempt using the MIT approach (as is Clojure on top of its JVM).

jimbokun• 16 years ago

"Somebody do something about this, before I LOSE MY FUCKING MIND!?!?!"

Um, what, exactly, is stopping the ranter from doing something about it himself? Is there a law that only people born into a special caste are allowed to create programming languages?

Or is he just too lazy to do more than bitch about the world being sub-optimal?

protomyth• 16 years ago

Most surveyors don't know how to actually build the road, they just know which way it should go.

ominous_prime• 16 years ago

If he did, he would risk learning why things are the way they are. There's definitely room for improvement, but modern languages have evolved this way for a reason. If he wants his own bloated DSL, then best of luck; but I probably don't want that same language for my projects.

StevenObua2• 16 years ago

Well, I am doing something about it :-) Look at Babel-17 (www.babel-17.com). It is not ready yet, and for the next few months it will be purely functional, but eventually, you will get it all.

redteddy23• 16 years ago

But if I learn babel17 won't I become a traitor!

StevenObua2• 16 years ago

Of course not, just learn it, then you'll see ;-)

scott_s• 16 years ago

Go is a systems programming language. It's not appropriate to expect Go to be able to send an email or create a web server in one line. Go is supposed to be a better systems programming language than C. It's not supposed to be a high level language with all of the things that he wants.

Also, language designers have to maintain a balance between improving the language and maintaining stability so that programmers can actually get work done. I think Guido is doing a good job of this (even though I might disagree with some of his design decisions).

chanux• 16 years ago

We all like to write a game like following, but...

Create football stadium and football players. Start the game when user presses spacebar. Make players have red shirts and white socks.

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Could-You-Explain-Programmin...

c00p3r• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, what he talks about is some yet another scripting language, not a system, close-to-hardware-level programming language.

Go is just a C 2.0 developed by its fathers and it's based on early works on Plan 9 project (if I understands correctly).

So, it is language for OS-level programming and, perhaps, google's own native client, and community will code and release lots of high-level libraries, as it happened for C or, say, perl.

kscaldef• 16 years ago

Good rant, but can we stop it with the "You need to understand category theory to do IO in Haskell" meme?

    main = do
       putStrLn "What's your name?"
       name <- getLine
       putStrLn ("Hello " ++ name)

Was that really so hard?

eru• 16 years ago

Yes, it's easy.

(And a few bits of category do help when you are toying around with other typeclasses. Have a look at the typeclassopedia for an introduction.)

chewbranca• 16 years ago

I think one of the big issues with the evolution of languages is the inherit complexity and time commitment involved in creating a language. I'm very intrigued by languages that run on VMs and provide you with an underlying platform to work with. Until language creation becomes a more reasonable task to accomplish, we won't see the the sweeping changes he wants to have.

chc2• 16 years ago

We can all agree that current programming languages have a lot of warts, but then he gets to his list of BARE MINIMUM features a language must have and the rant takes a hard left into Crazytown. Social networks and to-do lists as first-class, language-level features — not even a social network standard library, but a whole subset of the language dedicated to social networks and to-do lists.

It sounds like what he wants is a DSL, because the language he describes would be useless to most people who aren't in his exact position.

nailer4• 16 years ago

I do most of my work in infrastructure, and I'd find first class objects for IPs, networks, and humans useful.

oconnor0• 16 years ago

What advantages would first class IPs, networks, & humans bring over the ability to make first class objects for anything?

nathanb• 16 years ago

Yes, let's slam systems-level programming language Go for not catering to application developers...because what people writing operating system components and utilities really want is an e-mail address as a first-class language feature.

Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger

Related Stories