One day I found a tale of old
whose name I'd known but failed to seek,
and reading it consumed my night
till I retired, satisfied,
but fell into such fevered dreams
as ne'er had I experienced
that when I woke did not depart
and haunted me throughout the day.
I went about my daily life,
in hopes my madness soon would end,
but fell into anxiety
with paranoia calling me.
I would not go; I could not stay.
I grappled with the rationale
that this was all a side-effect
of what I had consumed last night.
Eventually it did depart.
My thoughts regained their normal state.
But I cannot quite shake the thought
that something changed inside me then.
Beware the thoughts of writers who
would prick you with their wicked pens.
Beware the words of others, friend;
it will make all the difference.
25 September 2010
10 September 2010
Language Hate
Users of StackOverflow will no doubt have seen a certain very popular community-wiki question: What are five things you hate about your favorite language? It comes from Brian D. Foy's journal on the same subject, wherein he suggests that those who cannot find five things to hate about a given programming language (such as design flaws, warts, or general annoyances) "don't know the language well enough to either advocate it or pull in the big dollars using it".
In large part, this is true. Conversely, I think there's a lot of unfounded language hate out there, and people who make claims about the purportedly inferior quality of a language typically also don't know said language well enough to make such claims. The reality is that there are simply a lot of people out there who are either simply misinformed, or worse, making arbitrary assumptions about languages that they neither know nor understand, and this is principally because they're afraid.
When you don't know a technology, it looks opaque at best, and hideous at worst. If a programmer doesn't experience an instant passionate attraction to a language (and, believe me, this is about as rare as it gets), the natural reaction is often to go exactly the opposite route and hate on it for no reason. This is the source of innumerable blog entries and forum posts excruciatingly detailing the author's visceral negative reaction, which typically goes something like this:
All of this is kind of a prelude to the important issue here: what I think. (After all, this is my blog.) Now, I can't say that language choice is wholly immaterial, as every language has its own strengths and weaknesses that should be appreciated even when the language itself is not suited to one's own needs. Take Erlang, for instance. I have never used Erlang, nor do I plan to do so in the near future. However, I can certainly appreciate the beauty of the syntax, the tightness and purity of the type system, and, of course, the breathtakingly simple concurrency support. Finding things to praise about a language that you know very little about is the first step toward actually getting yourself to sit down and learn it the way it was meant to be learned: standing on its own, with its own idioms, subtleties, strengths, and weaknesses.
But that brings me back around. Anyone who knows me knows I use C++ more than anything else, and there is only one reason for this: it doesn't get in my way. If I can come up with a program, chances are I'll be able to implement it efficiently, robustly, and, using appropriate idioms and libraries, quickly. Further, I don't pay a hidden cost for features that I don't use, which to me is another very important aspect of a language.
But what do I hate about C++? Ha! That I could limit it to only five things! In essence, everything I hate about C++, or any language that I use, is any "feature" or peculiarity that gets in the way of The Virtues of a Programmer:
Laziness: C++ makes me type. I may be a blazing fast typist. I may even have changed my keyboard layout to avoid as much as possible having to hit the Shift key while programming. But if there's anything about C++ that I dislike, it's the boilerplate. I'll be honest, I'm lazy. I like my editor to generate boilerplate code for me, but I also like it to generate it exactly as though I had typed it, which quite often is not possible. Thus C++ irritates my laziness.
Impatience: C++ makes me jump through hoops to express certain common ideas that are not natural to the language, and this is only slightly ameliorated by use of the (rather well designed) STL. I am impatient, and I want my program do be done as soon as possible so I can start using it and showing it off. Thus C++ irritates my impatience.
Hubris: C++ makes it difficult to maintain standards of code quality. While this is a natural trade-off against the raw expressive power of the language, C++ is definitely biased toward pragmatism in lieu of elegance and purity. I have seen the horrors of bad C++ code, from the run-of-the-mill C written in C++ to the sort of stuff with a comment above it saying just
If I haven't made these bad qualities seem bad enough, you're probably right. But they're the things that bother me on a day-to-day basis, and putting them up against the well-known Virtues is a good way of illustrating the reason behind the hate, without going into too much language-specific detail. In the context of these virtues, it becomes quite easy to analyse certain qualities about your preferred language that you like or dislike.
I would be remiss if I didn't go on to admit something that many who meet me are surprised to discover: I dislike Python. I've hardly used Python, and I already very much dislike it. It's simply a tool that I don't want to be involved with unless it's an absolute necessity.
Why? That's easy. The fundamental philosophy of Python is "there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it", designed as the antithesis of Perl's TMTOWTDI. This is in direct conflict with my views as a programmer, a linguist, and a human being. Bold words, eh?
Don't get me wrong. This philosophy is quite well integrated into the design of Python, and on the whole I have to praise it for its simplicity and relative consistency despite its massive growth over the years. But I simply can't abide prescriptivism. TMTOWTDI expresses an analysis of the real situation of programming and linguistics. There really is more than one way to write any given program, in the same way that there is more than one way to say a phrase. There are idioms, subtleties, and nuances. There is craftsmanship. Is it any surprise that Larry Wall was a student of linguistics, while Guido Van Rossum studied mathematics and computer science?
It all comes down to pragmatism versus elegance, and for me, despite my obsession with precise, beautiful code, writing an ugly program that works is better than writing a beautiful program that does nothing.
The only other reason I have for disliking Python is a very small nitpick: its syntax. No, I don't mean whitespace; I'm fine with that bit. It's just that human languages have loads of redundancy and compressibility and texture, which combined make it easy to read and comprehend running text at high speed. Python's syntax is deliberately minimalistic, and consequently there's very little for the eye to hold on to, so the reading rate is (for me) drastically lowered. It's the same reason I have trouble reading Lisp and even its kid brother Scheme, pretty little thing though the latter is.
This is the very same reason that I can never get myself to really learn Spanish or Italian, though I can already understand quite a bit from my knowledge of French and Latin. A phonetic orthography decreases the amount of redundancy in a word, reducing the ability to compensate for errors, and consequently reducing the reading rate. Like I said, only a minor problem.
Anyway, I strongly encourage you to look at your own preferred language and ask yourself what you hate about it, or take a language you think you hate, and ask yourself what there is to like. Especially if you're designing a programming language, this can provide some startling insight into what tools you, as a programmer, need to be developing and using.
I think that's about it for today. Good night, and good luck.
In large part, this is true. Conversely, I think there's a lot of unfounded language hate out there, and people who make claims about the purportedly inferior quality of a language typically also don't know said language well enough to make such claims. The reality is that there are simply a lot of people out there who are either simply misinformed, or worse, making arbitrary assumptions about languages that they neither know nor understand, and this is principally because they're afraid.
When you don't know a technology, it looks opaque at best, and hideous at worst. If a programmer doesn't experience an instant passionate attraction to a language (and, believe me, this is about as rare as it gets), the natural reaction is often to go exactly the opposite route and hate on it for no reason. This is the source of innumerable blog entries and forum posts excruciatingly detailing the author's visceral negative reaction, which typically goes something like this:
- Installed new language.
- Ran "hello world".
- Left alone for a while.
- Decided to attempt mid-size project in language.
- Became frustrated when new language didn't work like old language.
- Gave up.
- Ranted about the failings of new language.
All of this is kind of a prelude to the important issue here: what I think. (After all, this is my blog.) Now, I can't say that language choice is wholly immaterial, as every language has its own strengths and weaknesses that should be appreciated even when the language itself is not suited to one's own needs. Take Erlang, for instance. I have never used Erlang, nor do I plan to do so in the near future. However, I can certainly appreciate the beauty of the syntax, the tightness and purity of the type system, and, of course, the breathtakingly simple concurrency support. Finding things to praise about a language that you know very little about is the first step toward actually getting yourself to sit down and learn it the way it was meant to be learned: standing on its own, with its own idioms, subtleties, strengths, and weaknesses.
But that brings me back around. Anyone who knows me knows I use C++ more than anything else, and there is only one reason for this: it doesn't get in my way. If I can come up with a program, chances are I'll be able to implement it efficiently, robustly, and, using appropriate idioms and libraries, quickly. Further, I don't pay a hidden cost for features that I don't use, which to me is another very important aspect of a language.
But what do I hate about C++? Ha! That I could limit it to only five things! In essence, everything I hate about C++, or any language that I use, is any "feature" or peculiarity that gets in the way of The Virtues of a Programmer:
Laziness: C++ makes me type. I may be a blazing fast typist. I may even have changed my keyboard layout to avoid as much as possible having to hit the Shift key while programming. But if there's anything about C++ that I dislike, it's the boilerplate. I'll be honest, I'm lazy. I like my editor to generate boilerplate code for me, but I also like it to generate it exactly as though I had typed it, which quite often is not possible. Thus C++ irritates my laziness.
Impatience: C++ makes me jump through hoops to express certain common ideas that are not natural to the language, and this is only slightly ameliorated by use of the (rather well designed) STL. I am impatient, and I want my program do be done as soon as possible so I can start using it and showing it off. Thus C++ irritates my impatience.
Hubris: C++ makes it difficult to maintain standards of code quality. While this is a natural trade-off against the raw expressive power of the language, C++ is definitely biased toward pragmatism in lieu of elegance and purity. I have seen the horrors of bad C++ code, from the run-of-the-mill C written in C++ to the sort of stuff with a comment above it saying just
I'm sorry. But I digress.If I haven't made these bad qualities seem bad enough, you're probably right. But they're the things that bother me on a day-to-day basis, and putting them up against the well-known Virtues is a good way of illustrating the reason behind the hate, without going into too much language-specific detail. In the context of these virtues, it becomes quite easy to analyse certain qualities about your preferred language that you like or dislike.
I would be remiss if I didn't go on to admit something that many who meet me are surprised to discover: I dislike Python. I've hardly used Python, and I already very much dislike it. It's simply a tool that I don't want to be involved with unless it's an absolute necessity.
Why? That's easy. The fundamental philosophy of Python is "there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it", designed as the antithesis of Perl's TMTOWTDI. This is in direct conflict with my views as a programmer, a linguist, and a human being. Bold words, eh?
Don't get me wrong. This philosophy is quite well integrated into the design of Python, and on the whole I have to praise it for its simplicity and relative consistency despite its massive growth over the years. But I simply can't abide prescriptivism. TMTOWTDI expresses an analysis of the real situation of programming and linguistics. There really is more than one way to write any given program, in the same way that there is more than one way to say a phrase. There are idioms, subtleties, and nuances. There is craftsmanship. Is it any surprise that Larry Wall was a student of linguistics, while Guido Van Rossum studied mathematics and computer science?
It all comes down to pragmatism versus elegance, and for me, despite my obsession with precise, beautiful code, writing an ugly program that works is better than writing a beautiful program that does nothing.
The only other reason I have for disliking Python is a very small nitpick: its syntax. No, I don't mean whitespace; I'm fine with that bit. It's just that human languages have loads of redundancy and compressibility and texture, which combined make it easy to read and comprehend running text at high speed. Python's syntax is deliberately minimalistic, and consequently there's very little for the eye to hold on to, so the reading rate is (for me) drastically lowered. It's the same reason I have trouble reading Lisp and even its kid brother Scheme, pretty little thing though the latter is.
This is the very same reason that I can never get myself to really learn Spanish or Italian, though I can already understand quite a bit from my knowledge of French and Latin. A phonetic orthography decreases the amount of redundancy in a word, reducing the ability to compensate for errors, and consequently reducing the reading rate. Like I said, only a minor problem.
Anyway, I strongly encourage you to look at your own preferred language and ask yourself what you hate about it, or take a language you think you hate, and ask yourself what there is to like. Especially if you're designing a programming language, this can provide some startling insight into what tools you, as a programmer, need to be developing and using.
I think that's about it for today. Good night, and good luck.
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