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The Bootstrapped Compiler and the Damage Done
- captainmuon 13y ago> First, we understand how to design compilers better than any other type of program. Well, the author is speaking only for himself :-) I think most typical programmers understand other types of programs better than compilers. But great post, I agree a lot. Just like professional politicians are overrepresented in parliaments, compiler experts are overrepresented in language design. Most programs I've written belong to one of three categories: - Number crunching - GUI to display and edit data - Web app (HTML + JS frontend to a database) The classical languages for these kind of apps are Fortran (nowadays C++), Visual Basic o_O, and PHP. I don't have to tell you how each of these suck for various reasons. But each language has special features that make writing specific kinds of applications nicer. VB for example had a tight integration of the GUI designer, syntax sugar for accessing COM components, and so on. It had a `with` keyword that let you set lots of properties on GUI elements easily: With form1 .Title = "Hello World" .Width = 640 .Height = 480 With .btnOK .Font.Bold = True ' ... End With End With I'm not saying it was a great language... But one day I'd really like to design my own language, tailored to the kind of problems I have to solve. The result might look less like Haskell, and more like The Homer [1], but it would let me get stuff done without thinking to much about it. [1] http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer
- swah 13y agoMaybe Lisp and Forth are in the other extreme? The designer thought "I shall let my users be as powerful as myself".