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Considering there's an entire academic discipline of programming theory I strongly disagree with the description of language design as "cargo-cultism".

• rayiner 13y ago
  Only a few languages are the product of that theoretical discipline. There is, for example, a clear theoretical reason why Haskell functions are single input single output. But its inapplicable to nearly all languages. The languages people use are mostly the result of cargo cultism.
  • freyrs3 13y ago
    Theory aside, it would seem natural that a language that doesn't enforce 1-argument functions would have n-argument functions. Seems like the only logical two choices on the matter. Where does the cargo-cult in this decision come in?
• zzzcpan 13y ago
  It is considered cargo-cultism mostly because none of the languages ever have any scientific data to support decisions on various syntax choices. There are some very obvious bad choices of course, because of the large amount of bugs involving them, like manual memory management and pointer arithmetic, but other than that it's all just a hunch.
  • freyrs3 13y ago
    I don't understand why there is there a connection between syntax choice and cargo cult design? If anything syntax is the most solved part of language design.
  • djur 13y ago
    Cargo-cultism is the duplication of the appearance of functioning systems or structures in a context where they are nonfunctional or incorrectly functional. Copying the functionality of an existing system isn't a cargo cult. The persistence of features in programming languages you're describing isn't a cargo cult because the resulting products work. In addition, there's several benefits of conservative language development: it's generally easier to write compilers; existing programmers will find it easier to adopt a language that mostly resembles ones they already know; and some unfashionable but useful features may be retained. This is more of a "worse is better" situation than a "cargo cult" one.