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> Go is not an easy language, it is a simple language, those 2 things are not the same. This distinction is fundamental to any sort of design, but is unfortuna

> Go is not an easy language, it is a simple language, those 2 things are not the same. This distinction is fundamental to any sort of design, but is unfortunately lost on a lot of people (especially developers, in my experience). Easy and simple are near-universally conflated. > I do not believe in a universal language that is both easy for beginners while being concise for advanced users. Exactly. I really want some languages to be more intuitive and easy to pick up for non-programmers. The average person (whatever that means) does not have the first clue about the machines that run so many parts of their lives. At the same time, such a language would likely be a bad fit for most professional software development. That hardly means it's without value. I know languages like that exist, but they're often aimed at absolute beginners and are treated like toys. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground or "transition languages". Insert joke about how $LANGUAGE_YOU_DISLIKE is a toy.

jacobr1 6y ago
It seems like Basic has been the closest we've come on a general purpose language with "easy to pick up features" (at least in widespread use)?
malloci 6y ago
> The average person (whatever that means) does not have the first clue about the machines that run so many parts of their lives. Sadly, I would argue that this is also true of many developers.
jacobajit 6y ago
I mean, Python is the de facto beginner language and also used for professional software development (and of course intermediate data science work). Are you suggesting this is an unwise or unstable equilibrium?
- epicide 6y ago
  I'm glad you bring that up. I think Python is the closest we have to a "universal language" (even so, it still has some limitations). I think it works well for beginners because the language itself is so consistent and they have put a lot of effort into avoiding corner cases and "gotchas". And I think it works for professional uses because of third party library support. To answer your question: I'm not suggesting that at all. I'm honestly not entirely sure how Python balances it seemingly so well. Given the lack of focus in the industry towards "intermediate" programmers and use cases, my slight fear is that Python will be shoehorned into one direction or the other. Even if the language itself isn't, it does feel like the use-case-complexity gap is growing exponentially, at times. And not just with Python. Seemingly, you're either a complete beginner learning conditionals and for-loops or you're scaling out a multi-region platform serving millions of users with many 9's of uptime.
  - nonameiguess 6y ago
    Python does this so well because of the extremely full featured and fairly easy to use C API. Advanced programmers can write extension modules for the interpreter and provide APIs to their C libraries via Python, give their types and functions a basically identical syntax to MATLAB and R, and bang, statisticians, engineers, and scientists can easily migrate from what they already know how to use, pay no performance penalty, but do it in a language that also has web frameworks and ORMs. You can do machine learning research and give your resulting predictive models a web API in the same language. This gets badly underappreciated. I've been working in Python for a while and honestly, I hate it. I wish I could use Rust for everything I'm doing. I can't stand finding so many errors at runtime that should be caught at build time in a language with static type checking. But I also recognize the tremendous utility in having a language that can be used for application development but also for numerical computing where static typing isn't really needed because everything is some variant of a floating-point array with n dimensions. Mathematically, your functions should be able to accept and return those no matter what they're doing. All of linear algebra is just tensor transformations and you can model virtually anything that way if you come from a hard engineering background. Want to multiple two vectors? Forget about looping. Just v1 * v2. It will even automatically use SSE instructions. Why is that possible? The language developers themselves didn't provide this functionality. But they provided the building blocks in the form of a C API and operator overloading, that allowed others to add features for them. So the complaints you typically see about dynamic languages simply don't matter. No static typing? Who cares? Everything is a ndarray. Syntax is unreadable? Not if you're coming from R or MATLAB because the syntax is identical to what you're already used to using. Interpreted languages are slow? Not when you have an interface directly to highly optimized BLAS and ATLAS implementations that have been getting optimized since the 50s and your code is auto-vectorized without you needing to do anything. GIL? It doesn't matter if you can drop directly into C and easily get around it. Meanwhile, it's also still beginner friendly! EDIT: I should add, editable installs. That's the one feature I really love as a developer. You can just straight up test your application in a production-like environment, as you're writing it line by line. No need to build or deploy or anything. Technically, you can do this with any interpreted language, but Python builds this feature directly into its bundled package manager.
msiemens 6y ago
> Easy and simple are near-universally conflated. That’s an interesting statement as it doesn’t always work in other languages. In German (my native language) my first instinct was to translate both words as “einfach” which contains both concepts. In fact, in my online dictionary of choice the word “einfach” is the first entry for both “easy” and “simple”. So if Germans conflate these two it might be because of the language they speak :) But more to the point, I’m wondering how universal the distinction between easy and simple is when other languages cannot express that distinction as easily as in English.
- Nzen 6y ago
  If we were to agree that a simple task has low complexity to accomplish, and an easy task requires little energy to accomplish, then conflating them is straightforward, particularly when weighing the mental effort to accomplish the task. (Tying a shoelace is simple: four steps. Tying a shoelace with 5 pound weights on my wrists is still simple, but not easy.) Of course, if you don't agree to these definitions, then the intersection of them is thinner.
- dexterlemmer 6y ago
  Interesting. My native language, Afrikaans, has a lot of influence from both Dutch and German (as well as a bit from English and quite a bit from Bantu African languages). We say "eenvoudig" for "simple" and "maklik" for "easy". I recognize both the (different) Dutch words Google Translate provides me when I translate to Dutch as similar to the Afrikaans words, but Google Translate translates both to "einfach" when I translate to German. May be German for some reason conflates the meanings. That said, homonyms and homophones that conflate meanings are found in most human languages, and often for meanings that are far easier (or is that simpler ;-)) to distinguish than "simple" and "easy".

jacobr1 6y ago

It seems like Basic has been the closest we've come on a general purpose language with "easy to pick up features" (at least in widespread use)?

malloci 6y ago

> The average person (whatever that means) does not have the first clue about the machines that run so many parts of their lives. Sadly, I would argue that this is also true of many developers.

jacobajit 6y ago

I mean, Python is the de facto beginner language and also used for professional software development (and of course intermediate data science work). Are you suggesting this is an unwise or unstable equilibrium?

epicide 6y ago
I'm glad you bring that up. I think Python is the closest we have to a "universal language" (even so, it still has some limitations). I think it works well for beginners because the language itself is so consistent and they have put a lot of effort into avoiding corner cases and "gotchas". And I think it works for professional uses because of third party library support. To answer your question: I'm not suggesting that at all. I'm honestly not entirely sure how Python balances it seemingly so well. Given the lack of focus in the industry towards "intermediate" programmers and use cases, my slight fear is that Python will be shoehorned into one direction or the other. Even if the language itself isn't, it does feel like the use-case-complexity gap is growing exponentially, at times. And not just with Python. Seemingly, you're either a complete beginner learning conditionals and for-loops or you're scaling out a multi-region platform serving millions of users with many 9's of uptime.
- nonameiguess 6y ago
  Python does this so well because of the extremely full featured and fairly easy to use C API. Advanced programmers can write extension modules for the interpreter and provide APIs to their C libraries via Python, give their types and functions a basically identical syntax to MATLAB and R, and bang, statisticians, engineers, and scientists can easily migrate from what they already know how to use, pay no performance penalty, but do it in a language that also has web frameworks and ORMs. You can do machine learning research and give your resulting predictive models a web API in the same language. This gets badly underappreciated. I've been working in Python for a while and honestly, I hate it. I wish I could use Rust for everything I'm doing. I can't stand finding so many errors at runtime that should be caught at build time in a language with static type checking. But I also recognize the tremendous utility in having a language that can be used for application development but also for numerical computing where static typing isn't really needed because everything is some variant of a floating-point array with n dimensions. Mathematically, your functions should be able to accept and return those no matter what they're doing. All of linear algebra is just tensor transformations and you can model virtually anything that way if you come from a hard engineering background. Want to multiple two vectors? Forget about looping. Just v1 * v2. It will even automatically use SSE instructions. Why is that possible? The language developers themselves didn't provide this functionality. But they provided the building blocks in the form of a C API and operator overloading, that allowed others to add features for them. So the complaints you typically see about dynamic languages simply don't matter. No static typing? Who cares? Everything is a ndarray. Syntax is unreadable? Not if you're coming from R or MATLAB because the syntax is identical to what you're already used to using. Interpreted languages are slow? Not when you have an interface directly to highly optimized BLAS and ATLAS implementations that have been getting optimized since the 50s and your code is auto-vectorized without you needing to do anything. GIL? It doesn't matter if you can drop directly into C and easily get around it. Meanwhile, it's also still beginner friendly! EDIT: I should add, editable installs. That's the one feature I really love as a developer. You can just straight up test your application in a production-like environment, as you're writing it line by line. No need to build or deploy or anything. Technically, you can do this with any interpreted language, but Python builds this feature directly into its bundled package manager.

msiemens 6y ago

> Easy and simple are near-universally conflated. That’s an interesting statement as it doesn’t always work in other languages. In German (my native language) my first instinct was to translate both words as “einfach” which contains both concepts. In fact, in my online dictionary of choice the word “einfach” is the first entry for both “easy” and “simple”. So if Germans conflate these two it might be because of the language they speak :) But more to the point, I’m wondering how universal the distinction between easy and simple is when other languages cannot express that distinction as easily as in English.

Nzen 6y ago
If we were to agree that a simple task has low complexity to accomplish, and an easy task requires little energy to accomplish, then conflating them is straightforward, particularly when weighing the mental effort to accomplish the task. (Tying a shoelace is simple: four steps. Tying a shoelace with 5 pound weights on my wrists is still simple, but not easy.) Of course, if you don't agree to these definitions, then the intersection of them is thinner.
dexterlemmer 6y ago
Interesting. My native language, Afrikaans, has a lot of influence from both Dutch and German (as well as a bit from English and quite a bit from Bantu African languages). We say "eenvoudig" for "simple" and "maklik" for "easy". I recognize both the (different) Dutch words Google Translate provides me when I translate to Dutch as similar to the Afrikaans words, but Google Translate translates both to "einfach" when I translate to German. May be German for some reason conflates the meanings. That said, homonyms and homophones that conflate meanings are found in most human languages, and often for meanings that are far easier (or is that simpler ;-)) to distinguish than "simple" and "easy".