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The premise is the fatal disease. Programming languages are tools of expression. Asking which programming language is "best" is like asking which musical inst

The premise is the fatal disease. Programming languages are tools of expression. Asking which programming language is "best" is like asking which musical instrument is best. All the centuries of refinement and craftsmanship that go into making a good violin don't invalidate the piano.

warmfuzzykitten 16y ago
It's more like asking which musical notation is best.
- readymade 16y ago
  The textual nature of the two aside, I think this is perhaps a superficial comparison. Western musical notation has survived largely unchanged for hundreds of years because it covers the the bases of practically every major genre. While many computer languages are theoretically the same in terms of Turing completeness, they are also expressive media in in that they each bring affordances to the table that facilitate or discourage particular concepts, abstractions and patterns.
  - ohyes 16y ago
    Western musical notation has been continuously evolving. It is far from being 'largely unchanged for hundreds of years'. For example, look at the notation for this piece by Iannis Xenakis. (Shows the sheet music in the video). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI Compare to this gregorian chant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graduale_Aboense_2.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graduale_Aboense_2.jpg Or to this piece by his teacher oliver messiaen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Messiaen_Oiseaux_exotiques_excerpt.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Messiaen_Oiseaux_exotiques... There are some important things that are the same between the chant and the piece by Messian, but the notations are very very different, and have accumulated some really important stuff over the years. Saying that musical notation has been largely unchanged for hundreds of years is kind of like saying that English has remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years.... in that it is incorrect.
    - readymade 16y ago
      I probably should have made myself clearer, but I was referring to the modern standard of notation, which if I am not mistaken, is indeed largely the same as what you would find dating back to the 17th-18th centuries, i.e. several hundred years ago. A more instructive comparison, in this regard, would be between the Messiaen you linked and Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. Yes, I'm familiar with the experimentation with notation of 20th century composers such as Xenakis, Cage, Stockhausen, etc, but they're beside the point (no offense to you or Xenakis, I happen to like his work). Their music is obscure and inaccessible to a great deal of Westerners, even many of those who could ordinarily be considered "musically literate", and few of these modern, experimental forms of notation, to my knowledge, have caught on in a way that's comparable to the popularity of even an "obscure" or "academic" computer language such as Haskell. There have been and always will be exceptions, not to mention music that falls outside the realm of Western tradition entirely, but you have to admit that the umbrella of expression that fits the modern standard of notation is pretty wide. The point to take away, I think, is that once a standard came into common use that allowed composers to convey enough relevant information about the music they were creating, innovation in notation became a lot less important, for quite a long time. By a similar token, while English has of course been constantly evolving throughout its history, as all languages do, standard English orthography hasn't changed much in the last few hundred years either. You don't need a new kind of staff or notehead to represent chromaticism vs. baroque counterpoint, any more than you need new letters of the alphabet in order to write words and phrases that no one has ever heard before, in dialects that didn't exist at the time Walt Whitman wrote "Leaves of Grass", or what have you. As long as you're talking about notes over the chromatic scale, time and key signatures, common rhythmic subdivisions, and so on, you can notate whatever it is you like. In any case, the point I was making earlier in the thread is that this seems fairly different from the development of computer languages, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the inherent nature of computer languages as tools of abstraction that extend beyond the merely representational. Hence the comparison with musical instruments – in my view, code is more like a hammer than it is a book.

warmfuzzykitten 16y ago

It's more like asking which musical notation is best.

readymade 16y ago
The textual nature of the two aside, I think this is perhaps a superficial comparison. Western musical notation has survived largely unchanged for hundreds of years because it covers the the bases of practically every major genre. While many computer languages are theoretically the same in terms of Turing completeness, they are also expressive media in in that they each bring affordances to the table that facilitate or discourage particular concepts, abstractions and patterns.
- ohyes 16y ago
  Western musical notation has been continuously evolving. It is far from being 'largely unchanged for hundreds of years'. For example, look at the notation for this piece by Iannis Xenakis. (Shows the sheet music in the video). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI Compare to this gregorian chant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graduale_Aboense_2.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graduale_Aboense_2.jpg Or to this piece by his teacher oliver messiaen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Messiaen_Oiseaux_exotiques_excerpt.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Messiaen_Oiseaux_exotiques... There are some important things that are the same between the chant and the piece by Messian, but the notations are very very different, and have accumulated some really important stuff over the years. Saying that musical notation has been largely unchanged for hundreds of years is kind of like saying that English has remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years.... in that it is incorrect.
  - readymade 16y ago
    I probably should have made myself clearer, but I was referring to the modern standard of notation, which if I am not mistaken, is indeed largely the same as what you would find dating back to the 17th-18th centuries, i.e. several hundred years ago. A more instructive comparison, in this regard, would be between the Messiaen you linked and Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. Yes, I'm familiar with the experimentation with notation of 20th century composers such as Xenakis, Cage, Stockhausen, etc, but they're beside the point (no offense to you or Xenakis, I happen to like his work). Their music is obscure and inaccessible to a great deal of Westerners, even many of those who could ordinarily be considered "musically literate", and few of these modern, experimental forms of notation, to my knowledge, have caught on in a way that's comparable to the popularity of even an "obscure" or "academic" computer language such as Haskell. There have been and always will be exceptions, not to mention music that falls outside the realm of Western tradition entirely, but you have to admit that the umbrella of expression that fits the modern standard of notation is pretty wide. The point to take away, I think, is that once a standard came into common use that allowed composers to convey enough relevant information about the music they were creating, innovation in notation became a lot less important, for quite a long time. By a similar token, while English has of course been constantly evolving throughout its history, as all languages do, standard English orthography hasn't changed much in the last few hundred years either. You don't need a new kind of staff or notehead to represent chromaticism vs. baroque counterpoint, any more than you need new letters of the alphabet in order to write words and phrases that no one has ever heard before, in dialects that didn't exist at the time Walt Whitman wrote "Leaves of Grass", or what have you. As long as you're talking about notes over the chromatic scale, time and key signatures, common rhythmic subdivisions, and so on, you can notate whatever it is you like. In any case, the point I was making earlier in the thread is that this seems fairly different from the development of computer languages, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the inherent nature of computer languages as tools of abstraction that extend beyond the merely representational. Hence the comparison with musical instruments – in my view, code is more like a hammer than it is a book.