Comment by Solar19 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Solar19 | Hacker News Reader

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So I'm coming at this from a social science perspective. Why did I say "not Rust"? I'm working on a research program to get at what happens when people engage with programming for the first time, aspects of language design that attract or repel learners, and as sort of a related offshoot, why smart women are so disproportionately less interested in programming.

One of my working hypotheses is that programming is terrible. More precisely, the majority of (smart) people who are introduced to programming have a terrible experience and do not pursue it. I think many smart people walk away thinking that it's stupid – that the design and workings of prevailing programming languages are absurd, tedious, and nonsensical. (Note that most men aren't interested in a programming career either. So it's not just smart women.)

Most intro to CS or programming courses seem to use Java these days. That's an unfortunate choice. To veteran programmers, Rust likely seems very different from other languages. Its default memory safety, ownership and borrowship and other features are innovative. (Though the amazing performance of Go's garbage collector seems to weaken the case for Rust's approach somewhat.) However, to new learners, I'm pretty sure Rust will be awful. It's fully traditional in its mass of punctuation noise, just saturated with bizarre (to outsiders) curly braces and semicolons. It also has, in my opinion, extremely unintuitive syntax. I see it as somewhat worse than Java in that respect.

Honestly, Rust is brilliant in more ways than one. I just think they punted on syntax and punctuation noise. I think our timeline is just weird and tragic when it comes to programming languages. They're almost all terrible and just so poorly designed. There's hardly any real scientific research on PL design from a human factors perspective, and what research there is is not applied by PL designers. PLs are just the result of some dude's preferences, and no one seems to be thinking outside of the box when it comes to PL design. In the end, to really make progress in computing and programming, we might need outsiders and non-programmers to design PLs. I'll say that the now-canceled Eve programming language project is a notable exception to the consistent horribleness of modern PLs. We need a few dozen Chris Grangers.

Is it really important how easy it is to learn a language when we are talking about formally verified operating system kernels? Beginners are probably not going to write formally verified code, let alone formally verified system code, so this area is already only accessible to veteran programmers who may not have a problem with these aspects of Rust.

I don't think it's a contradiction to introduce people to programming with more "elegant" or uniform languages that are closer to math (like Scheme or Haskell), or "easy" languages like Python, and then have them move on to Rust if they want to do system-level programming.

I see your point on beginners and formally verified systems code. However, I'm imagining a somewhat different universe.

Formally verified systems code is a nightmare right now. It's almost impossible, and hardly anyone does it for pay. Obscure tools like Isabelle or Coq are needed. People try to shoehorn formal verification onto C, which is a terrible lack of imagination and use of time. Maybe it's easier with Ada or Haskell or something – not sure.

I want a revolution. I want a whole suite of new, clean-sheet programming languages that are the result of furiously brilliant multifaceted design. I want formal verification to be easy, or easier, and baked in to systems languages. I want new operating systems built in these new languages. Some of the dissenters in this thread are assuming that building a new operating system involves firing up your C compiler of choice, and dismiss the whole enterprise as a multiyear bug-ridden nightmare ("never rewrite!" they say) – that is definitely not what I'm thinking about. To hell with C.

It's time to move forward. This is supposed to be a technology industry. It's supposed to be about technological progress. PL design is not progressing. It's awful and it repels newcomers, especially women. We need to drop all these assumptions about programming being done in primitive plain text editors on primitive steampunk Unix-like OSes using primitive command line interfaces with languages as intractable as Linear A. That whole package, which is often what people are introduced to in intro CS courses, is about the worst way to introduce people to the power and wonder of computing that we could have devised.

We need to think more deeply about how to handle and represent various abstractions, functions, and imperative code. Functions should not have bizarre void statements and empty parens, for example. That's so unintuitive. At this point, functions should probably be like equation editors. The pure mathematical function in its normal book representation could be what we see in our IDEs. Visual/graphical programming never really got out of the gate because they just converted code to boxes and arrows. There's an opportunity there to rethink that whole approach.

But if we don't get people interested in programming, if we don't make it less terrible, they never get to systems work. And systems work should not look like Rust or C++. There is no reason why a modern IDE or even text editor should need curly braces or semicolons to understand or compile code at this point in the history of the software industry. Text is a solved problem. Indentation and spacing and line breaks are all trivial to parse. Colors could be semantic. Emoji could be code. Icons, badges like we see for build passing/failing could also be used as code. There's a lot we could do to make programming make a lot more sense.

One of the reasons I want to get more women into programming is that I think they'll be better programmers than men in some respects. Think of archetypes or stereotypes like Hermione vs Harry Potter, Lisa Simpson vs Bart, Wendy Testaburger vs Stan, Kim Wexler vs Jimmy McGill. There is anecdotal, cultural, and scientific evidence to suggest that women – or some subset of women – are more responsible and meticulous than some of the male personality types we often see in tech.

I'll have more on this this week in my report on Medium on Google's firing of developer James Damore for citing well-established social and personality psychology research (my field) on sex differences. I get into some of the reasons programming is generally terrible, and why women might be disproportionately repelled by it. Dart is my victim/example in this report, but I think pretty much all languages are awful. (Eiffel and F# should be the worst case, the bare minimum starting points...)

Thanks, that's very interesting!

We did think a lot about the syntax, but we wanted to choose something that'd be familiar to existing systems programmers. It's largely based on C++ and Java, with a little bit of ML thrown in. This is because the language is, in many senses, C++ with some ML thrown in.

> We need a few dozen Chris Grangers.

Agreed :)

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