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Why I hate programming language flame wars?

2 points by aligajani 12y ago

There are two kinds of people. The ones that code, and ones that fret about it. Programming language flame wars have existed since time immemorial. Node.js programmers hate on PHP programmers. They claim PHP sucks because of 'xyz' reasons. And then there are PHP programmers who hate on Java programmers because it produces long ass code. And then there are C programmers who hate all interpreted languages because they aren't real programming languages. I don't get it. Programming languages are tools people, and your users don't care. Instead of fretting about the elegance of a programming language, it is way more wiser to use your programming language, like a freaking tool, and make a product that people, the end users, will find useful. I hate programming language flame wars. It isn't helping the community at all. Instead of being cry babies and finding faults in programming languages, we, as software artisans, mustn't forget that our goal, as a community is to respect each other's tools and work towards creating a culture of love between the various programming communities. Get flame wars out of your way! Okay, PHP has an inconsistent needle/haystack amongst other problems, Ruby doesn't scale and Java produces verbose code, but at the end of the day, there are systems running on all these programming languages. Don't fret, get coding. Just do it!

cordite 12y ago
Perhaps some of the bashing is to relieve frustration from work where we maintain a code base in a language we don't like. In my case.. that is VB 6. And I can say plenty of things about it.
- aligajani 12y ago
  What's bad about VB 6? Just curious.
  - cordite 12y ago
    Verbosity is a real nuisance. Exceptions have odd flows, you have to use `On Error GoTo SomeHandlerInFunction`. For runtime efficiency you have to work against the system to make sure things are typed and not automatically casted to `Variant` and back every operation. Events do not fire in the right order, rendering some of them useless (Context: You are in a text field, you do Alt+E to press a button with 'e' underlined on the form. Click on the command button is fired before validation of the text field). The official IDE from way back when is buggy as heck, often gets into not-sane states between debugging.
    - cordite 12y ago
      For example.. `Dim x, y as Long` results in only `y` being long. Internal functions like `InputBox` or string functions like `Left`,` Right`, `Trim`, `Mid`, and so on return variant not string. So you have to do a little extra there.
      - JakDrako 12y ago
        You can append a "$" to those functions (ie, Left$(), Right$(), Mid$(), etc) to use the "return a string" version of these functions.
        cordite 12y ago
        Yes, and that's why I mention those specific functions.
MrBra 12y ago
Fortunately, we use tools, but we are not just machines.