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,,grammar should be redundant. You’ve all heard people say that statement terminating ; are not necessary because the compiler can figure it out. '' I'll stay

,,grammar should be redundant. You’ve all heard people say that statement terminating ; are not necessary because the compiler can figure it out. '' I'll stay with my non-redundant Julia language, thank you very much. It gave me a lot of joy to programming, and I don't remember having big problems with error messages. Even if I have, syntactic errors are trivial to find. The hard parts of efficient programming are memory management (garbage collection), controlling vectorizing instructions, balance between ease of GPU programming and efficiency, parallelization, not semicolons at the end of a line. All programming languages have to decide on how low level control they give to the computer resources, and how they abstract them, to make high level programming possible without sacrificing too much efficiency.

adimitrov 7y ago
Whilst you're not wrong about what you value about a programming "language", I'd say there is an important distinction to be drawn between two things people tend to conflate: the language and the runtime. Perhaps a counterexample is in order to explain it: Java the language and Java the runtime (VM, stl) are two different things entirely. Kotlin, for example makes a lot of different choices in language design (e.g. semicolons) while reusing the same runtime (GC, threads, etc.) Of course, you can often not tease these two concerns apart easily and neatly, but there is merit in giving thought to the ergonomics of the pure language side of things. At the end of the day, a programming language doesn't need an implementation to be useful (e.g. as a teaching tool) as it's an abstract, formal concept.