Reasons to hate any programming language

Anyway, here's my 5 for Haskell.

1. Sometimes the type system feels backwards. What if I don't want the compiler to infer types for my variables? What if I want the opposite, where it does constraint checking on said variables? For example, instead of inferring the type of the elements of a list, it instead makes sure that they all belong to a particular typeclass. This is a subtle but huge difference that makes it difficult for me to program UIs. It can be done, but it seems to take more effort than it does in some other languages.

2. Allowing the construction of infinite values leads to some really frustrating errors sometimes. Sometimes you make mistakes of the form "let x = f x", which is valid in some situations and not others.

3. Monad should imply Applicative should imply Functor.

4. Bytestring handling bites you in the ass sometimes and you don't know it until your program crashes because you mixed things up improperly. Something is wrong here, when we are losing type information that should have prevented this.

5. Typeclasses should be automatically derived for trivial cases, like witness types, but there's a strong potential for abuse there.

1. It doesn't just know what I want it to do.

2. It doesn't accept ambiguous syntax.

3. I still have to type stuff, even if I use an IDE.

4. It's not fast enough (for any value of "fast").

5. It's either too verbose or else unintelligible.

5) Polymorphic comparison is an ugly hack and land you in an infinite loop when accidentally used on a circular imperative structure. Type classes (specifically, an Ord type class) would fix this problem.

4) Arbitrary gaps and inconsistencies in the standard library. Extlib and Batteries go a long way to fix this, but the language really just needs a standard library overhaul.

3) Inefficient data representation and wonky hacks to optimize a few special cases (e.g. 31/63 bit integers).

2) Absolutely terribly C interface which requires deep knowledge of the runtime data layout.

1) Too many languages in one: OCaml is the awkward synthesis of an awesome module system (functors, first class modules, etc...), a slightly confusing but cool object system, the classic ML core, and some random fancy features (such as polymorphic variants). The interaction of these parts ends up being pretty confusing.

All that said, it's still my favourite language.

I hate the fact that we have to program using plain text. A program is not really a sequential structure. I'm old, I do know the reasons that this anachronism has perpetuated. It's been a pain in the ass to deal with proprietary formats using not quite right tools. But in 2010? Seriously? How hard is to define a simple format that can be understood by simple editors?

Just an example: comments need to fit the syntax. So there's a need to delimite them, so some characters or characters combination are not allowed, or you need to use escape sequences, alternating delimiters or something. Think of code blocks that are commented out. I absolutely hate the time that I need to spend "formating" comments. It'd be trivial to create an editor that used certain special character (one that's < ASCII 32) to delimite comments, so we would not have to deal with this.

In general, the editor should be syntax-aware, in a more thorough sense (the editor would perform a first step of compilation), not in the patchy "syntax highlighting" way in which a quick and dirty scan of text is used. That would also speed compilation and "intellisense".

It would also eliminate syntax and the artificial differences among languages. Instead of curly braces vs, indentation vs. begin-end pairs vs. whatever, the program structure would be recognized by the editor and presented graphically.

The editor should only accept legal constructions (the rest would be considered comments or incomplete senteces) instead of the distracting red understrike of Eclipse.

In general, what I most hate is the fact that most languages use the very same constructs, while still are written differently and you need to learn the quirks of each of them. A while loop is the same in most languages. What's the point of learning stupid syntax for a dozen languages. I feel I'm working for the compiler. It should be the other way around.

I hate languages that do now allow me to do something, just because the language "designer" decided so. I feel the languages should be construction kits, not a set of rules to constrain what I can do with them. Why can't I have garbage collections in some languages and at the same time I can't have manual memory management in others? Why can't I have a language that accepts new constructs like Lisp, but not having to be Lisp with all its constraints?

So to summarize, I hate syntax. I hate a = b vs. a := b vs. b -> a vs. let a = b vs. ... Languages have become walled gardens, bigotry and us vs. them. Of course some tasks are different. But I think there's no real reason not to have all the features in the same language and define "sections" of code that use certains "modes", except the competition.

a = [1,2,3]

x = :foo

puts x

a = a.map do |x|

  x+1

See anything wrong here? (hint: what is the value of x?)

1) Collection classes.

2) Collection classes.

3) Collection classes.

4) Collection classes.

5) Collection classes.