Beyond the hackerisms
There was a time when I would have loved something like Smart Friends U.. But I think that time has passed.
Why?
I’ve basically given up on the long-term viability of C++ as a language. I’m writing it off, along with PL/1, as a language that should die because it is too complicated. I’d write off Perl for that too, but I doubt everyone else would agree with me on that.
I was never incredibly impressed with Dylan, or any ML derived language. I admit that they’ve got potential, but after all these years - why didn’t they catch on like say Python did? I liked Dylan for a while there, but the thing is - and here’s the real reason for my viewpoint - it is a language that addresses problems that I don’t have presently.
The problems that I have and need to have addressed are more workflow problems (write enough test cases), requirements problems (you mean you really meant _ when you said you wanted _?), and stuff like that. I used to think I’d be able to develop a single language that would be a one-size fits all. I know I’m not there yet. I don’t know if I ever will be.
But I’m happy doing what I do now with my website: some PHP, some Python, some Perl (but I’d like to move away from that, but I’m not going to kill myself to do so), some shell (but not much), some SQL, and so on.
And I’m happy doing what I do in terms of programming for my research: some shell, some Python, some C, some C++, some Mathematica.
And I’m happy doing what I do when I develop MacOS software: some AppleScript, some Java (nothing released using that yet), some Objective C, some shell.
I use lots of languages, each for it’s own best purposes. If I learned more, what would it be for? The only things that I think could seriously use a new language are XML data transforms (I should teach myself XSLT, I know) and web services (I’m still not incredibly pleased by most of the XML-RPC and/or SOAP bindings that I’ve seen for a lot of the existing scripting languages).
If I want something highly optimized (I rarely do) I’ll write in C or C++ or Objective-C. Speed is so not a concern (except occasionally for my research) that I hardly ever do that - hence I rarely have a desire to leave the scripting language world.
Now, if I were a different sort of developer for a different sort of application (one that cared about performance and such - such as a game or whatnot) then maybe I’d care about all those C++ hackerisms found there. But I don’t - at least not right now - and I don’t know if I ever will.
Please, rip into this post and tell me why C++ is the best language for everything - or something like that - and maybe I’ll reconsider.
Well, C++ is certainly not the best language for everything or even everybody. I like to program in C++ for many thing, but not for all things. I’ll often write a quick program in Python or even Objective Caml, if it seems more intuitive to do it in one of those two.
Speaking of Objective Caml, I have to say I’m a huge fan of it. It’s one of the most powerful languages I’ve ever used… it’s just too bad it doesn’t have more support. It’s so much better than Lisp or Scheme. I hate the syntax of those two, so ugly, so hard to read.