Many of the programming languages that are regularly the butt of everyone’s jokes don’t just allow you to use them badly, they make it easy to do so, sometimes easier than using them well.
This is not a good thing.
A good language should
be well suited to the task at hand
be easy to use correctly
be hard to use incorrectly
The reality is that the average software developer barely knows best practices, much less how to apply them effectively.
This fact, combined with languages that make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot leads to lots of bad code in the wild.
Tangentially related rant
We should attack this problem from both directions: improve developers but also improve languages.
Sometimes that means replacing them with new languages that are designed on top of years of knowledge that we didn’t have when these old languages were being designed.
There seems to be a certain cynicism (especially from some more senior developers) about new languages.
I’ve heard stuff like: every other day a new programming language is invented, it’s all just a fad, they add nothing new, all the existing languages could already do all the things the new ones can, etc.
To me this misses the point. New languages have the advantage of years of knowledge accrued in the industry along with general technological advancements, allowing them to be safer, more ergonomic, and more efficient.
Sure, we can also improve existing languages (and should, and do) but often times for one reason or another (backwards compatibility, implementation effort, the wider technological ecosystem, dogma, politics, etc.) old quirks and deficiencies stay.
Even for experienced developers who know how to use their language of choice well, there can be unnecessary cognitive burden caused by poor language design. The more your language helps you automatically avoid mistakes, the more you can focus on actually developing software.
We should embrace new languages when they lead to more good code and less bad code.
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Many of the programming languages that are regularly the butt of everyone’s jokes don’t just allow you to use them badly, they make it easy to do so, sometimes easier than using them well.
This is not a good thing. A good language should
The reality is that the average software developer barely knows best practices, much less how to apply them effectively.
This fact, combined with languages that make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot leads to lots of bad code in the wild.
Tangentially related rant
We should attack this problem from both directions: improve developers but also improve languages.
Sometimes that means replacing them with new languages that are designed on top of years of knowledge that we didn’t have when these old languages were being designed.
There seems to be a certain cynicism (especially from some more senior developers) about new languages.
I’ve heard stuff like: every other day a new programming language is invented, it’s all just a fad, they add nothing new, all the existing languages could already do all the things the new ones can, etc.
To me this misses the point. New languages have the advantage of years of knowledge accrued in the industry along with general technological advancements, allowing them to be safer, more ergonomic, and more efficient.
Sure, we can also improve existing languages (and should, and do) but often times for one reason or another (backwards compatibility, implementation effort, the wider technological ecosystem, dogma, politics, etc.) old quirks and deficiencies stay.
Even for experienced developers who know how to use their language of choice well, there can be unnecessary cognitive burden caused by poor language design. The more your language helps you automatically avoid mistakes, the more you can focus on actually developing software.
We should embrace new languages when they lead to more good code and less bad code.
C++ has entered the chatWhich subset of C++ specifically? That thing’s ridiculously huge.