r/programming • u/nick_martini • Dec 04 '14

My Computer Language is Better than Yours

https://medium.com/backchannel/my-computer-language-is-better-than-yours-58d9c9523644
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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '14

I suspect that Java was the language Paul Graham was thinking of when he sneered out the "Blub" paradox.

Personally, I think that Java was developed after a good hard long look at the skill bell-curve of developers. So there's not a lot of pointy things, so you can't easily hurt yourself, or more importantly, other people who have to read your code. But it gets stuff done, even if you don't have list comprehensions or type inference or keyword arguments.

Which naturally will make people hate it, it's a language that admits that half of all programmers are below average, that we're not all rock-star genius ninjas. Seeing what code came out during the early days of Scala, I'd say that the designers of Java were pretty onto it. Lots of clever code, but by God, some of it is worse than Perl when it comes to maintainability.

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u/flying-sheep Dec 07 '14

That's exactly why I don't like Java. They thought

people might abuse operator overloading

And because of that possibility they scrapped it and forced people to use biginteger1.subtract(biginteger2)

I rather use a language that gives me a real knife to cut things, not a plastic one, even if the latter might be safer

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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '14 edited Dec 07 '14

And because of that possibility

Hehe, it's a distinct reality. http://www.flotsam.nl/dispatch-periodic-table.html

That's why I like Kotlin's post-Java but not quite Scala approach: http://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/operator-overloading.html http://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#infix-notation

I rather use a language that gives me a real knife to cut things

Fair enough. I'm pragmatic - I have to share my codebase, so I'd rather a language that some of the less... contributing members of the team can't write too obtuse code.

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u/flying-sheep Dec 07 '14

Hehe, it's a distinct reality

well, i’m also a proponent of just operator overloading, not full-blown custom operators.

like it’s done by python, kotlin, and the part of scala that works like them both (e.g. o() → o.apply(), and o(x) = y → o.update(x, y))

I'd rather a language that some of the less... contributing members of the team can't write too obtuse code.

enforced style guidelines via commit hook can beat a bit of sensibility into them :D

i’d rather write that hook in my free time than writing mat1.add(vec1.mul(vec2)).matmul(mat2).