4 ms·

> We already have less powerful languages, like C. I don't think this is a good comparison. C is a systems language and operates at a completely different leve

by japhib 4y ago

> We already have less powerful languages, like C. I don't think this is a good comparison. C is a systems language and operates at a completely different level of abstraction than Python. Also, it's very powerful. It might not have a lot of language features per se, when compared to something like Python, but production-grade C code is just as complex (probably more so) than production-grade Python code. I generally agree with the rest of your comment. But saying that C is the "less powerful" language rubbed me wrong :)

danuker 4y ago
I agree that C lets you more precisely control what a CPU does. By that definition of "powerful", I think the assembly language of that processor is the most powerful language. But the cost with which you must put up is also large (the intricacies of the CPU, memory allocation, types and such breed complexity). Some tasks are not worth that cost. For instance, you want to print "hi" to the console. A shell script saying "echo hi" is perfectly adequate. No need to declare a main function or import anything. By defining "power" as this "efficiency" or "sparseness" or "brevity" measure, strictly looking at this example, C is less powerful than bash. I tried to take literal code length per Rosetta code task as a very rough measure of "terseness" (the x-axis), and I'm curious what you think. https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html In any case, my definition of "power" is close to the opposite of what it means in the OP article.
Guthur 4y ago
There is no great difference between any of them. They're all essentially procedural languages with various bells and whistles bolted on. The list comprehension is about the only high level feature in python in my opinion and it's still quite underwhelming.

4 ms·

> We already have less powerful languages, like C. I don't think this is a good comparison. C is a systems language and operates at a completely different leve

by japhib 4y ago

danuker 4y ago
I agree that C lets you more precisely control what a CPU does. By that definition of "powerful", I think the assembly language of that processor is the most powerful language. But the cost with which you must put up is also large (the intricacies of the CPU, memory allocation, types and such breed complexity). Some tasks are not worth that cost. For instance, you want to print "hi" to the console. A shell script saying "echo hi" is perfectly adequate. No need to declare a main function or import anything. By defining "power" as this "efficiency" or "sparseness" or "brevity" measure, strictly looking at this example, C is less powerful than bash. I tried to take literal code length per Rosetta code task as a very rough measure of "terseness" (the x-axis), and I'm curious what you think. https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html In any case, my definition of "power" is close to the opposite of what it means in the OP article.
Guthur 4y ago
There is no great difference between any of them. They're all essentially procedural languages with various bells and whistles bolted on. The list comprehension is about the only high level feature in python in my opinion and it's still quite underwhelming.