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I'm not sure that I accept the distinction between technical issues and accessibility issues in the case of programming languages. Any Turing-complete language,
by pgcj_poster 7y ago
I'm not sure that I accept the distinction between technical issues and accessibility issues in the case of programming languages. Any Turing-complete language, given the right tooling, can be used to solve any software problem. Ultimately, we only use languages other than FORTRAN (or even assembly, for that matter) because it's easier.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoA grid of rocks in a desert is turing complete. It's not a useful concept for discussing the differences between programming languages, precisely because it's such a low bar. "Any software problem" includes these two extremely common problems, neither of which has anything to do with Turing completeness: * It needs to do something fast * It needs to be written quickly
- pgcj_poster 7y agoI wasn't suggesting that Turing completeness means that all languages are somehow the same. To the contrary, I was arguing that languages are differentiated primarily by how easy they are to use for a particular task—in other words, their accessibility. Execution speed is clearly not the reason why multiple programming languages exist, because assembly is as fast or faster than high-level languages. Rather we use programming languages because they are easy to understand and reason about, allowing us to work quickly, among other things. The usability of a language is impacted by things like whether it has automatic memory management, or whether it uses functions instead of gotos, but also by the vocabulary it uses. Consequently, I see the vocabulary of a language as not particularly different from those other attributes.