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As an alternative viewpoint, it's bizarre that we can't support these things. Mathematics textbooks from 400 years ago are relatively intelligible, and those f
by crygin 7y ago
As an alternative viewpoint, it's bizarre that we can't support these things. Mathematics textbooks from 400 years ago are relatively intelligible, and those from 100 years ago are easily readable. But with computer science, a domain which consists entirely of problems we ourselves invented, we've wedged ourselves into a situation where we are apparently so bad at computer language design (let alone systems engineering/systems architecture) that something surviving for a decade is frankly notable.
- gtirloni 7y agoProgramming languages are more like spoken languages than mathematical languages. They evolve fast. Programming languages also are versioned, something that's nonexistent and blurry in spoken languages. There's no support for Latin in almost any software today and books in Latin can be read by a extremely small minority. Even a English speaker from the 1700s would have trouble with today's English.
- zamadatix 7y agoApples to oranges. I don't think you'd be as surprised if the statement were reworded to "the human brain has more flexibility in parsing to understand intent from text than a computer". The issue is very unlikely to be poor language design as, as you allude, people can parse old code just fine. The thing we're actually bad at is building computers that reason intent from content like we do.
- merlincorey 7y agoWhat are you talking about "surviving for a decade?" Python 2 was released in 2000 -- part of why Python 3 was called Python 3000, I believe.
- tingletech 7y agoperl code I wrote in 2001-2004 is still running in production today, and I don't think I'll ever need to port it to perl6/roku.