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> the syntax of a programming language is entirely arbitrary [..] Programming languages weren't designed This statement is quite simply wrong. Unless I'm misun

by veddox 6y ago

> the syntax of a programming language is entirely arbitrary [..] Programming languages weren't designed This statement is quite simply wrong. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you seem to be ignoring decades worth of programming language research and the years of work put into designing individual languages (whether by BDFLs, communities, or ANSI committees). I agree with you that perhaps jet engines weren't the perfect metaphor. However, I think that that's because jet engines have much more stringent external (physical) constraints than software or programming languages. The latter do allow for a certain amount of "taste-judgment": it doesn't matter too much which way you do it, but some people at some times prefer one way over another. So a more apt metaphor might be architecture: We've known how to build houses for millenia, but we're still improving our materials and techniques, while tradition and fashion continue to play a big role in what they end up looking like.

asdff 6y ago
I get that programming languages are designed by committee and every decision is thought out, but that still makes some things arbitrary to whatever they decided. It really is arbitrary that a for loops is done like this in python: for val in sequence: print(val) and this in R: for (val in sequence) { print(val) } and this in bash: for val in sequence; do echo val; done I mean there was no paper that I can find that found curly braces to be especially drawing to the human eye or anything like that. or that it's particularly intuitive to write "do" and "done" or not. For loops look like no linguistical sentence structure that I recognize, they are pretty much their own thing structurally imo. These are all arbitrary decisions decided by people, because it just happened to make arbitrary sense at the time for any number of reasons. Not because the R core team ran some psychological experiments to empirically determine the most intuitive for loop structure when they drafted their language; that data has never been collected, the R core team just followed what the S team had already done and that's that. Arbitrary.

by veddox 6y ago

asdff 6y ago

I get that programming languages are designed by committee and every decision is thought out, but that still makes some things arbitrary to whatever they decided. It really is arbitrary that a for loops is done like this in python: for val in sequence: print(val) and this in R: for (val in sequence) { print(val) } and this in bash: for val in sequence; do echo val; done I mean there was no paper that I can find that found curly braces to be especially drawing to the human eye or anything like that. or that it's particularly intuitive to write "do" and "done" or not. For loops look like no linguistical sentence structure that I recognize, they are pretty much their own thing structurally imo. These are all arbitrary decisions decided by people, because it just happened to make arbitrary sense at the time for any number of reasons. Not because the R core team ran some psychological experiments to empirically determine the most intuitive for loop structure when they drafted their language; that data has never been collected, the R core team just followed what the S team had already done and that's that. Arbitrary.