On 23/03/2012 04:16, Steve Howell wrote:
On Mar 22, 8:20 pm, rusi<rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mar 23, 7:42 am, Steve Howell<showel...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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?
It will be a fact of life wherever Godels theorem is; which put
simplistically is: consistency and completeness cannot coexist. This
is the 'logic-generator' for the mess in programming languages.
Put in more general terms:
Completeness is an 'adding' process
Consistency is a 'subtracting' process
Running the two together, convergence is hopeless.
Fair enough, but I don't think you can blame Godel's Theorem for the
fact that JS, Ruby, Perl, and PHP all solve basically the same
problems as Python in 2012. Can't we agree that at least *Perl* is
redundant, and that the lingering existence of Perl 5 is an artifact
of culture, legacy, and primitive experimentation (by future
standards), not mathematical inevitability?
Perl's support for Unicode is much better than the others.
In programming language terms the pull is between simplicity and
expressivity/power.
Sure, you can see this tension between Python (simplicity) and Ruby
(expressivity). My idea of progress--way before 2062--is that you'd
still have a spectrum of simplicity and expressivity, but the level of
elegance and power throughout the spectrum would be elevated. There
wouldn't be a monoculture, but the cream would eventually rise toward
the top.
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