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Not everyone uses languages designed by people with no place designing a language and taken from there. Not every language is PHP, JavaScript, C++, et al. Tak

Not everyone uses languages designed by people with no place designing a language and taken from there. Not every language is PHP, JavaScript, C++, et al. Take a look at a Lisp, APL or a derivative, or Ada for examples of languages designed by people who knew what they were doing. Lisp grew in universities under the direction of hackers and there are several standard dialects now. APL was designed by a mathematician originally as a teaching aid. Ada was designed in a contest by the US DoD after spending a long while collecting requirements and it was then fully specified before any implementation work was done.

munificent 7y ago
> by people who knew what they were doing. The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge. The Lisp inventors hadn't even sorted out variable scoping leading many Lisps to have dynamic scoping which is now widely agreed to be the wrong default. Also, the Lisp-1 versus Lisp-2 split. These were clearly people that were figuring it out as they went along, which they would be the first to admit. > standard dialects An oxymoron if there ever was one. :) > APL was designed by a mathematician originally as a teaching aid. ...and it's virtually dead. There are many interesting ideas in there but it doesn't seem like Iverson's ideas about what is a desirable notation for thought resonated with any significant fraction of people. There were many years where APL was a standard part of a CS degree. With that much forced contact, you would expect it to have stuck around if it had so much going for it. (See: Pascal and BASIC, which punched above their weight in large part because of early introduction in schools.) > Ada was designed in a contest by the US DoD after spending a long while collecting requirements and it was then fully specified before any implementation work was done. Ada also has a lot of interesting ideas but... outside of the DoD, it's not exactly doing well either. It turns out that spending several years writing an enormous specification without regard to implementation leads to... unbelievably complex, expensive implementations that take years to reach the market. Who could have predicted that? The economic cost of implementing the language is a salient part of its fitness. It doesn't matter how nice the language is if you can't actually use it because you don't have a working compiler. C++ is only bad to the degree that you can completely wish away path dependence. (Hint: You can't.) There were many languages better than C++ designed at the time, but they didn't take off because they lacked the features we hate in C++ today. Those features existed as a path to lead the existing C programmers to C++. Meanwhile, other purer languages floated off in space, beautiful but unreachable by mortals. JavaScript was just a sad rush job that we're all unfortunately stuck with. I agree with you on PHP.
- verisimilitudes 7y ago
  The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge. They at least had the advantage of not being forced to design a language for a failed startup, to be easy to learn where that's defined as resembling C, and other asinine considerations people continue to take into account nowadays. These were clearly people that were figuring it out as they went along, which they would be the firt to admit I'm not claiming otherwise, but the birth of Lisp was a paper written by an AI researcher that had good thought poured into it, not something meant to look like C and be good enough for whatever its purpose was on a strict time schedule. ...and it's virtually dead. Why would that matter? Why does every language need to appeal to many people? Why is that a desirable quality? There's still plenty of APL being written. I even have an article concerning this: http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-08-08 http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-08-08 Who could have predicted that? Ada was designed to be implemented efficiently and understood easily. It's harder to write a good C or C++ compiler than it would be to write a good Ada compiler; there's simply fewer people doing this and GNAT is popular. The only compiler I'm aware of for C that anyone actually uses, sans the behemoths of GCC and Clang/LLVM, is tcc, and almost no one uses that. There's more Common Lisp implementations that are actually used than there are for C and the only reason you'd see more C compilers for Ada is because it's a smaller language with a standard that lets the implementor get away with doing so little at the cost of every program written in the language and because the standard for a C compiler is so low that it's expected to have bugs. The economic cost of implementing the language is a salient part of its fitness. When you start judging something in computing by its fitness, it reminds me of a virus, and that reminds me of The UNIX-HATERS Handbook and its description of C and UNIX. C++ is only bad to the degree that you can completely wish away path dependence. I don't know what you mean by this. Common Lisp doesn't care how code is loaded and Ada has a nice with and use system. I do know C++ is a gargantuan language where the very grammar is ambiguous and is parsed differently by different compilers and I'm also aware it has little in static analysis due to this. Debugging Common lisp is simple due to its interactivity and Ada was designed to be statically-analyzed. Part of why I mentioned APL, Lisp, and Ada is because I use all three of these languages. I could care less what the masses use. Do racecar drivers care about the people driving vans? Vans are more popular than racecars. Why should computing be different?

munificent 7y ago

> by people who knew what they were doing. The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge. The Lisp inventors hadn't even sorted out variable scoping leading many Lisps to have dynamic scoping which is now widely agreed to be the wrong default. Also, the Lisp-1 versus Lisp-2 split. These were clearly people that were figuring it out as they went along, which they would be the first to admit. > standard dialects An oxymoron if there ever was one. :) > APL was designed by a mathematician originally as a teaching aid. ...and it's virtually dead. There are many interesting ideas in there but it doesn't seem like Iverson's ideas about what is a desirable notation for thought resonated with any significant fraction of people. There were many years where APL was a standard part of a CS degree. With that much forced contact, you would expect it to have stuck around if it had so much going for it. (See: Pascal and BASIC, which punched above their weight in large part because of early introduction in schools.) > Ada was designed in a contest by the US DoD after spending a long while collecting requirements and it was then fully specified before any implementation work was done. Ada also has a lot of interesting ideas but... outside of the DoD, it's not exactly doing well either. It turns out that spending several years writing an enormous specification without regard to implementation leads to... unbelievably complex, expensive implementations that take years to reach the market. Who could have predicted that? The economic cost of implementing the language is a salient part of its fitness. It doesn't matter how nice the language is if you can't actually use it because you don't have a working compiler. C++ is only bad to the degree that you can completely wish away path dependence. (Hint: You can't.) There were many languages better than C++ designed at the time, but they didn't take off because they lacked the features we hate in C++ today. Those features existed as a path to lead the existing C programmers to C++. Meanwhile, other purer languages floated off in space, beautiful but unreachable by mortals. JavaScript was just a sad rush job that we're all unfortunately stuck with. I agree with you on PHP.

verisimilitudes 7y ago
The Great Old Ones did not have access to any lost mystical knowledge. They at least had the advantage of not being forced to design a language for a failed startup, to be easy to learn where that's defined as resembling C, and other asinine considerations people continue to take into account nowadays. These were clearly people that were figuring it out as they went along, which they would be the firt to admit I'm not claiming otherwise, but the birth of Lisp was a paper written by an AI researcher that had good thought poured into it, not something meant to look like C and be good enough for whatever its purpose was on a strict time schedule. ...and it's virtually dead. Why would that matter? Why does every language need to appeal to many people? Why is that a desirable quality? There's still plenty of APL being written. I even have an article concerning this: http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-08-08 http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-08-08 Who could have predicted that? Ada was designed to be implemented efficiently and understood easily. It's harder to write a good C or C++ compiler than it would be to write a good Ada compiler; there's simply fewer people doing this and GNAT is popular. The only compiler I'm aware of for C that anyone actually uses, sans the behemoths of GCC and Clang/LLVM, is tcc, and almost no one uses that. There's more Common Lisp implementations that are actually used than there are for C and the only reason you'd see more C compilers for Ada is because it's a smaller language with a standard that lets the implementor get away with doing so little at the cost of every program written in the language and because the standard for a C compiler is so low that it's expected to have bugs. The economic cost of implementing the language is a salient part of its fitness. When you start judging something in computing by its fitness, it reminds me of a virus, and that reminds me of The UNIX-HATERS Handbook and its description of C and UNIX. C++ is only bad to the degree that you can completely wish away path dependence. I don't know what you mean by this. Common Lisp doesn't care how code is loaded and Ada has a nice with and use system. I do know C++ is a gargantuan language where the very grammar is ambiguous and is parsed differently by different compilers and I'm also aware it has little in static analysis due to this. Debugging Common lisp is simple due to its interactivity and Ada was designed to be statically-analyzed. Part of why I mentioned APL, Lisp, and Ada is because I use all three of these languages. I could care less what the masses use. Do racecar drivers care about the people driving vans? Vans are more popular than racecars. Why should computing be different?