Why We Need More Programming Languages

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages, given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 — 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'"

Re:No, we need one *better* language, not "more"

[PatDev]

The idiocy of this comment stems from the fact that it's author must have no experience in programming language design. We are all quite aware that humans are the primary users of our languages. The problem is that it's not helpful to have the peanut gallery always yelling "that one doesn't make me happy, make it more soft and people-like. I don't want to have to map my mental model - make it map its".

It's all well and good to say "make it understand English", but there are two primary problems with this. First, natural language programming is hard. Really hard. Just getting a computer to understand English with any reasonable reliability is pretty far in the future, and we can't wait for that. Second, we as humans don't really have much success expressing exactly what we want. It's why the most insidious bugs are not in code, but in specification. We so often don't know quite what we want that restrictive languages are actually beneficial, in that they force us to reason consistently.

And it's not some "saying floating around the internet", it's a very famous quote from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a seminal text in basic programming language theory and compiler/interpreter design. Most importantly, it's probably the first book you should read if you want to intelligently discuss this topic.

Another quote you might find interesting:

When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.

- Alan Perlis

In short, from someone who likes to design programming languages - stop assuming that just because the problem is easy to understand that it is easy to solve. We're not all basement-dwelling geeks who think UNIX is the pinnacle of end-user usability and newbs should just get over it. We aren't pretending that there is no problem, and we're not refusing to educate ourselves on how to solve it.

Re:Pffft.

[b4dc0d3r]

Joel disagrees, bug fixes tend to accmulate. Things you should never do [joelonsoftware.com]

The bugs happen when new features are added, same as with the original developers.