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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

"output" is a keyword, cannot change it (I guess one could recompile the interpreter and define it as something else)

semicolons separate statements. Dont like them at the beginning, move them to the end.

Dont like the label names. Rename them to whatever suits you.

The thing that you may be misunderstanding is that this is written for me, not you. It is written to please my sense of aesthetics, not yours. I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different.

You probably could not write a program I would use. I would find "deficiencies" and reject it for something else.

If programming is objective then why are there thousands of different languages, and the number is constantly increasing. All of them are basically doing the same things.

Honest question. Why are there so many different languages. Whats behind that.

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"I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different."

Well, unless you are the only programmer that company will ever has, you should write code that others can read and understand. Or if you are working in academia, then you can write as you like, but as a professional, you should write readable code for those coming after you.

Devils advocate:

GP might work for a company working on a niche application (be it software or hardware) that requires code to be written like the aforementioned and anyone who specialises in that field is already adept in reading and writing code like that.

I'm not going to defend that choice of programming style for everywhere but software development is a broad industry where you do get pockets of people working on code that looks totally alien to others who are used to see C or ALGOL derived languages. Take LISP for example, there is LISP code in half of all European TVs shipped in the 90s. Forth is used in loads of places, even FreeBSD's bootloader is written in Forth. Machine code is almost completely unreadable for humans yet a massive chunk of software in the 80s was written using it.

My point is the industry might have standardised on a subset of syntax styles that seem readable to the lowest common denominator of developers but it's a massive industry with developers using all sorts of exotic languages effectively. Let's not go down the rabbit hole of saying they're doing it wrong because their code looks alien to you before you've understood the field in which that code is running in.

You’re losing karma for this but you’re right. It’s a massive industry and there are specialties out there writing code in languages that would look unreadable to your average web developer yet the code is well written and perfectly readable to those in the same specialty.

Sometimes I wonder if the only people who browse this site are JavaScript monkeys and Rust fanboys. There’s a whole spectrum of languages out there that looks nothing like C.

Check your assumptions. What if someone is not working as a programmer, not working in academia and not sharing programs with others, except in HN comments/submissions.

There was a story that appeared on HN many years ago and I wish I could find it again. It described a gentleman in Japan who did not work in the computer industry but did some sort of (let's call it) "optimisation work" on his own as a hobby. The story told that the work was being used by companies within the computer industry, I think it was hardware manufacturers. If I recall correctly he did not have any formalised education in computer science or mathematics. I am probably getting some details wrong; need to find this story again.

> Honest question. Why are there so many different languages. Whats behind that.

1. Personal pride.

2. Personal or corporate need for control

3. Personal or corporate need for visibility/fame.

4. Licensing unfit for desired use.

5. Technical or social impossibility to extend existing language to fit target space.

And plain old ... personal/group preference?

Some people like different tools for reasons other than pride, ambition, need for control, etc.

Some things are more enjoyable for some people. Chocolate vs vanilla kind of thing.

You’re way off the mark!

1. Might happen occasionally but rarely would anyone adopt a vanity language

2. Nope

3. Lol this is just a rehash of 1.

4. Languages can’t be licensed, compilers can. And that’s why we often have multiple different compilers.

5. Now you’re getting close.

The actual reason is:

Trying to solve a different problem

Believe it or not, problems can vary massively from one field of IT to another. Some require low level hardware access, some need mathematical compatibility, others might be optimised for text parsing, and sometimes you just care about developer throughput. There’s macro scripting, web development, games development, server side software, OS development, and firmware. And entire industries using their own specialist tools that most people don’t even know about unless you happen to already work in it.

Some languages are designed to be bullet proof and used in aviation or other domains where failure isn’t an option, some are the electronic equivalent of duct tape designed to allow people to quickly stick operations together.

Programming is such a massive industry that you need different languages for different problems.

Ever heard of C#, J#, Typescript, Kotlin, Go?

Yes and only C# was created because of NIH syndrome:

C# - Created by Microsoft after Sun sued them over Java. But C# (or rather .NET) did still solve several problems with Java’s JVM (eg it’s much easier for end users to work with, it supports native widgets, first class Windows support) and personally I find C#’s syntax a little more grown up too. It’s also worth noting that C# has since evolved into its own language (rather than just being a Java knock off).

J# - there isn’t any other functional language that targets .NET so there is a distinct problem J# seeks to solve.

TypeScript - That language clearly aims to solve several short comings of JavaScript, such as type safety.

Kotin - I don’t know much about this language personally but the Wikipedia article answers my point for me:

> In July 2011, JetBrains unveiled Project Kotlin, a new language for the JVM, which had been under development for a year.[17] JetBrains lead Dmitry Jemerov said that most languages did not have the features they were looking for

Go - this filled a massive hole at the time: languages that had the guarantees of a statically compiled language while being as quick to learn and develop on as a JIT compiled language and which were cross platform. I actually adopted Go in version 1.0 for a personal project specifically because it solved problems with the other mainstream languages - problems that were very relevant to the project I was creating.

I’m an old fart with 30 years of software development experience across well over a dozen different languages (you could easily treble that if you want to include machine or compiler specific dialects too). The problem many have when they see the term “general purpose” is they assume it means “best suited for all purposes” but actually it just means “can solve most problems with some degree of success”. Thus there will naturally be specific domains where even the most versatile languages are superseded by another language. And that’s fine. Good programmers can adapt to using the right tools. Whereas bad programmers will reach for the same tools regardless of the problem because they’re too lazy or too ignorant to learn anything else.

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