On Mar 22, 10:44 am, Steven D'Aprano <steve +comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:29:48 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote: > > Or at least before *I* black out. Even if somebody manages to write your > meta-language, you're going to run into the problem of who is going to be > able to use it. The typical developer knows three, maybe four languages > moderately well, if you include SQL and regexes as languages, and might > have a nodding acquaintance with one or two more. >
Maybe I'm not the typical developer, but I think "three, maybe four" is a very low estimate of the number of languages that the typical developer confronts in his lifetime. Just in the last couple weeks I've looked at code in all these languages: Python2 PHP JavaScript CoffeeScript C Perl Shell (bash) Regex (three variants--bash, Python, PHP) awk (albeit trivially) SQL (two variants--MySQL and Hive) HTML CSS With the exception of awk, I know all of the above languages in some depth, way beyond a "nodding acquaintance." I'm not taking any sides on the meta-language debate in pointing this out; I'm merely suggesting that we do live in a bit of a Tower of Babel. I'm only arguing with the numbers in your premise; maybe even if you underestimate the number of languages that typical devs consume in 2012, you could still draw the same valid conclusions overall with a slightly more accurate estimate. > There are a huge number of incompatible programming languages because > language designers have different requirements, preferences, and styles; > and because the state of the art of language design is very different in > 2012 than it was in 1962. Do you think we'll always have a huge number of incompatible programming languages? I agree with you that it's a fact of life in 2012, but will it be a fact of life in 2062? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list