Different Strokes for Different Folks (Was: Assessing a language)

nharvey@probitas.cs.utas.edu.au (Nicole Harvey) writes:
> I am involved in assessing a language. Does anyone know of a standard
>set of problems that I could use to judge the languages compabilities?


The Moderator adds:
>[It has long been my belief that preferences in languages is an entirely
>religious issue. Computational capabilities aren't much of an issue since
>they're all Turing equivalent. How is it for parallel multi-lingual
>object-oriented database update, to pick a few buzzwords? -John]


I agree with the moderator here, although I would call language
preference a "religious issue." I think that too many people think that a
new programming language has to be able to do everything that all the old
programming languages can in order to be useful; this results in the
crufty specifications for Common Lisp and Ada.


More importantly, I think a programming _language_ should embody a
natural programming _style_. The trend towards object-oriented languages
(C++/LOOPS) is a good example. There's nothing that can be done in C++
that couldn't be done just as well in C, with the appropriate hacking
around with function pointers, but that's not really the point. C++ makes
coding in an object-oriented style easy.


For each style there is (or should be!) an appropriate language.
Prolog makes search-based programs easy, but nobody would want to write a
numerical analysis package in it. Functional languages like pure ML are
great for manipulating quasi-static data structures, but I would hate to
write a network-flow algorithm in it.


Surprisingly, there hasn't been much work in developing
heterogenous programming environments, to support a sort of "mix and
match" approach to programming. Such tools would go a long way to
alleviating the language holy wars, I think.
--
Jack Eifrig (eifrig@cs.jhu.edu) The Johns Hopkins University, C.S. Dept.
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.