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Perhaps a controversial opinion: there are no bad programming languages, just bad practices. Learn both C++ and Rust. If you use them enough you will come to se

Perhaps a controversial opinion: there are no bad programming languages, just bad practices. Learn both C++ and Rust. If you use them enough you will come to see the pain points with time, for yourself, and they will not be problems so much as opportunities for creative solutions. I have my opinions about languages but one constant is that I like programming and all of them facilitate this in different ways.

aaroninsf 6y ago
IMO anyone who takes issue with this level-headed maturity is... well, probably still of an age and in a career moment where the absence of experience is perceived to be best addressed through bravado and "passion." Sayeth the graybeard.
- marsdepinski 6y ago
  Stay off my lawn!
- giantDinosaur 6y ago
  I dunno. Is anything 'bad'? Maybe there's no difference between anything. I feel like we're talking about building materials and someone pipes up to say 'no building material is bad', which is kind of true, but then we all die because our bridge was built with glass. We do have to be discerning, and that does involve real criticism of language design and choice.
  - flatline 6y ago
    There is nothing wrong with glass - just don’t use it to build a bridge! (I don’t disagree with you)
    - collyw 6y ago
      Meh, google fibreglass bridge.
  - collyw 6y ago
    The differences between languages / frameworks is probably overstated. I like Python and Django and dislike JavaScript. I can still solve problems in both, but I can make it more cleanly and elegantly in the former. Maybe I just need to do more JavaScript, but there definitely appears to be more warts in JS than Python.
    - giantDinosaur 6y ago
      I'm speaking from personal experience: due to hiring freezes I had to deliver significantly more by myself for clients than expected, and the only way I was able to do it effectively solo was to use languages like Elm instead of JS, to guarantee I wasn't making certain time consuming errors that frankly weren't really acceptable to make given the constraints. It taught me, concretely, that there can indeed be massive differences between languages and paradigms, and that choice can make or break you in several different ways. Basically, this has ensured that I do not accept truisms about how everything is kinda similar - it isn't, and that has real world consequences. In the case of OOP it's generally the consequence of boring you out of existence since it is so inextricably linked to Java at this point. I'll grant you that you can solve problems with any language, though. ;-)
mathw 6y ago
No, there are bad programming languages. It's just that it's all of them. We have yet to develop a language which lets you tell the computer what you want it to do and have the computer do it in an efficient manner without having to write test suites (which have bugs) and do manual testing (which misses things) and static analysis (which is imperfect) and do performance testing (which is hard and expensive and may or may not be able to replicate the actual performance conditions your software will experience in the real world). But this is not to say that some languages are not worse than others, because they are.
- brain5ide 6y ago
  Well, to be honest, we don't have any kind of language for that. It's as if these serializer-of-an-imagined-state things which we call languages are not good for communicating our intentions, or anything really. Godel or Wittgenstein for references here, probably.

aaroninsf 6y ago

IMO anyone who takes issue with this level-headed maturity is... well, probably still of an age and in a career moment where the absence of experience is perceived to be best addressed through bravado and "passion." Sayeth the graybeard.

marsdepinski 6y ago
Stay off my lawn!
giantDinosaur 6y ago
I dunno. Is anything 'bad'? Maybe there's no difference between anything. I feel like we're talking about building materials and someone pipes up to say 'no building material is bad', which is kind of true, but then we all die because our bridge was built with glass. We do have to be discerning, and that does involve real criticism of language design and choice.
- flatline 6y ago
  There is nothing wrong with glass - just don’t use it to build a bridge! (I don’t disagree with you)
  - collyw 6y ago
    Meh, google fibreglass bridge.
- collyw 6y ago
  The differences between languages / frameworks is probably overstated. I like Python and Django and dislike JavaScript. I can still solve problems in both, but I can make it more cleanly and elegantly in the former. Maybe I just need to do more JavaScript, but there definitely appears to be more warts in JS than Python.
  - giantDinosaur 6y ago
    I'm speaking from personal experience: due to hiring freezes I had to deliver significantly more by myself for clients than expected, and the only way I was able to do it effectively solo was to use languages like Elm instead of JS, to guarantee I wasn't making certain time consuming errors that frankly weren't really acceptable to make given the constraints. It taught me, concretely, that there can indeed be massive differences between languages and paradigms, and that choice can make or break you in several different ways. Basically, this has ensured that I do not accept truisms about how everything is kinda similar - it isn't, and that has real world consequences. In the case of OOP it's generally the consequence of boring you out of existence since it is so inextricably linked to Java at this point. I'll grant you that you can solve problems with any language, though. ;-)

mathw 6y ago

No, there are bad programming languages. It's just that it's all of them. We have yet to develop a language which lets you tell the computer what you want it to do and have the computer do it in an efficient manner without having to write test suites (which have bugs) and do manual testing (which misses things) and static analysis (which is imperfect) and do performance testing (which is hard and expensive and may or may not be able to replicate the actual performance conditions your software will experience in the real world). But this is not to say that some languages are not worse than others, because they are.

brain5ide 6y ago
Well, to be honest, we don't have any kind of language for that. It's as if these serializer-of-an-imagined-state things which we call languages are not good for communicating our intentions, or anything really. Godel or Wittgenstein for references here, probably.