WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog

Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Programming languages suck?

Bruno De Wolf blogs about programming languages. His statement: "all programming languages suck". Not sure whether I agree. But's let look at his arguments. In his words, a good programming language, among others, is readable by a guy who didn't write the original program and who doesn't know all the language details or libraries.

Personally, I don't agree. Code readability, above all, depends on the programmer. Programming languages that impose structure can probably help, but it's possible to create unreadable code in any language—that doesn't need goto.

Since I went to the 'karel de grote' institute of higher education, I learned quite a number of programming languages. Hairy code is possible with all of them. Unreadable code is easy with some of them, and some of those I do consider good programming languages. I guess my criteria are different:

• Flexibility. In theory any programming language that is turing-complete will allow one to write any imaginable program. In practice, some programming languages will require you 100 lines of code to do stuff which can be done in three lines in another language. A programming language that doesn't require you to turn your brain upside down three times to figure out how to get something done is a better language in my book than one that does. A language that provides multiple ways to do any given thing is very strong for this particular requirement; it allows you to pick the best way to do anything in order to prove readability. The alternative is for you to have to write some extra hairy code because the language requires you to jump through silly hoops.
  The Turing Machine utterly fails this criterion. Any language that lacks pointers or references or something similar fails it, too, though not in such a dramatic way. Perl is very good in this particular requirement.
• Compactness. I blame COBOL for this particular requirement, but it's still rather important, in my opinion: a programming language should not require me to write an entire novella for a simple 'hello world' program. Obviously COBOL utterly fails this requirement. Large parts of Java's libraries do, too. Perl and C are rather good at this particular requirement.
• Resembling english. COBOL fails this requirement, too—COBOL is english, not a programming language. Brainfuck fails, as well. Obviously. Mostly everything else passes. Except for windev, that is, which resembles French. Hah.

That's it, I guess. In my book, a programming language is a tool to get a job done. A good tool is flexible, not too unwieldly, and somewhat intuitive. Like a hammer. If you want to build a table, you probably need a hammer, among other things. The better the hammer, the more likely it is that you'll get a nice table. But even the best hammer won't get you a wonderfully crafted table if your carpenter sucks at his craft.

And so it is with programming languages: it might help if you use a proper language, but any good programmer can write readable code in any programming language.

/en/computer/code

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