On 7/9/2016 12:37 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Saturday, 9 July 2016 at 00:14:34 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 7/8/2016 2:58 PM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Friday, 8 July 2016 at 21:24:04 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
All useful computer languages are unprincipled and complex due to a number of
factors:
I think this is a very dangerous assumption. And also not true.
Feel free to post a counterexample. All you need is one!
Scheme.
I know little about Scheme, so I googled it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)
And the money shot:
"The elegant, minimalist design has made Scheme a popular target for language
designers, hobbyists, and educators, and because of its small size, that of a
typical interpreter, it is also a popular choice for embedded systems and
scripting. This has resulted in scores of implementations, most of which differ
from each other so much that porting programs from one implementation to another
is quite difficult, and the small size of the standard language means that
writing a useful program of any great complexity in standard, portable Scheme is
almost impossible."
Seems that in order to make it useful, users had to extend it. This doesn't fit
the criteria.
Wirth's Pascal had the same problem. He invented an elegant, simple, consistent,
and useless language. The usable Pascal systems all had a boatload of dirty,
incompatible extensions.
What is true is that it is difficult to gain traction if a language does not
look like a copy of a pre-existing and fairly popular language.
I.e. Reason #2:
"what programmers perceive as logical and intuitive is often neither logical
nor intuitive to a computer"
I don't understand what you mean by this.
What programmers think of as "intuitive" is often a collection of special cases.
