2 ms·
That’s a fair assessment, but it misses the point somewhat. All I’m saying is that we should be able to write programs that clearly express our intent, and a re
by evincarofautumn 15y ago
That’s a fair assessment, but it misses the point somewhat. All I’m saying is that we should be able to write programs that clearly express our intent, and a result-oriented language would make that easier than a process-oriented one.
“The overall specification of what the webpage is, from start to finish—is simply the program you wind up writing!”
This is not true; the implementation is very far removed from the specification. It is not easy to look at a bunch of SQL and PHP code and deduce precisely what the requirements of the site are. But in a different sort of language, it could be.
- derekp7 15y agoThe problem is that a results oriented / declarative language would by definition not be Turing complete. And in order for a language to be able to express any problem type, it would have to be Turing complete. SQL is an example of this -- it is declarative, but you can't write a web server or an arcade game in just SQL.
- evincarofautumn 15y agoYour first statement is patently false. You miss the meaning not only of “result-oriented”, but also “declarative”. Besides, Turing-completeness is not a difficult criterion to meet in a language—in fact it’s almost more difficult to avoid it.
- tadfisher 15y agoI'm reminded of TeX, where Knuth struggled to keep it declarative-only for years until the macro system added tail-recursion, becoming a Turing-complete language in its own right.
- TheSOB88 15y agoWhy do you say by definition it wouldn't be Turing complete?