On Tuesday, 5 January 2016 at 16:10:21 UTC, Jason Jeffory wrote:
Is it possible that one could develop or modify an existing
programming language that can adapt in such a way to provide
maximum unity between programmers?
What are the properties of the perfect language? To be able to
create it we have to know them.
Here are a few "laws" that I think it would have to have:
1. Grammar independence...
2. Platform independence...
Languages differences are far from just grammatic or platforms.
You seem to completely ignore semantics, and it's very different.
But most important, people are different and their needs in
different projects are different, so they need different things
from the language.
Alex wants to control memory allocation to the last bit and do it
manually.
Bob doesn't care about memory and wants a GC to clean things up,
don't make him think about all those free(), delete, reference
counts or whatever.
Charlie thinks in terms of for loops and bytes.
Dan thinks in terms of applicative functors and natural
transormations in 2-categories for the left Kan extensions of his
free monads. (yes, it's still programming)
Ellie wants dynamic typing.
Frank wants strong static types everywhere.
Gordon wants all his data to be immutable and all functions
referentially transparent.
Howard likes mutating data in-place. Allow him, and Gordon will
lose his ability to reason about the code.
Good luck making all these guys write in one language and
understand each other.
Talking about evolution. Did you ever see evolution leading to
consolidation into one specie? It works just the opposite:
different habitats are filled with millions of different species.
Survival of the fittest for each place == right tool for each job.
