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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

It's really weird that we all don't just use one language. Can you imagine if different contractors building houses in the same neighborhood all spoke 7 different languages?

Sorry, the bathroom's gonna be later than we thought, we're having trouble finding a plumber who speaks Esperanto. And the deck's actually slanted because the framing team spoke a different language than the deck-building team so their interfaces weren't designed together. The roof is also porous now because the roofers' language didn't easily support water-tightness. Also, we need a crane to lift our toolbox since we need a duplicate tool for every language and now it weighs 5,000lbs.

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I think it's really weird that we use different languages when building a house. Sorry, the basements gonna take longer than we thought. There's wiring issues and we don't have anyone available who speaks electrical. And the bathroom's gonna be another 2 weeks since we need to call in someone who speaks plumbing. Not sure why there are so many different kinds of plumbing pipes, if they were all PVC i'd be able to do it myself.

But... builders do speak different languages. Plumbing, electrical, framing, drywall, painting, flooring, finishing, foundation pouring, hvac, landscaping, ... these are all very different fields with people that specialize in a narrow subset. And sometimes they do have miscommunications that screw things up because they don't all understand what everyone else needs.

Its more like "Our pipes will be _at least_ 2 weeks late, because we can't find a guy that knows how to use a MIG welding machine, and we won't fork for a TIG one".

Programming Languages are known, not carried, they weigh nothing.

Using a single language for everything would be terrible, like using a Chinese Army Survival Shovel-fork-axe-spoon-saw-pan-ruler-hoe-hammer to build a house, it'd do everything, and do everything terribly.

Languages are more like tools or materials than spoken language.

It's also literally impossible to pick just one - you would fail at the JavaScript vs C problem.

But maybe if we always had this philosophy, we would all be coding everything in cobol.

> It's also literally impossible to pick just one - you would fail at the JavaScript vs C problem.

We could just make one language that had the features of both javascript and C. We literally can invent anything we want. A n y t h i n g. We have to throw away all our preconcieved notions about what's possible and just make the world the way we want it to be / a way that's better than we have now

In the same sense we could invent a single appliance that performs all kitchen tasks, rather than having a separate refrigerator, food processor, stove, oven, etc.

relevant: https://brython.info/ Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the Web. As such, it is a Python 3 implementation

And people will call your language "bloated", and say "I only need those specific features which will allow my language to be developped faster/faster to compile/easier to learn/etc" and we're back again to multiple languages. Of course your simple language will then grow, gain more functionalities (since eitehr you will add them, or you will be replaced by something that adds them), etc. Then people will find your language bloated, create a new simple language. We've been through this cycle many times already. Same with frameworks (micro vs fully featured), databases (SQL vs NoSQL), web stuff (server rendered HTML vs JS).

I don't think spoken language is the equivalent metaphor here. There's a grammar and toolchain for plumbing problems, and a different grammar and toolchain for framing problems. The fact that you can't use a nail where a machine screw is supposed to go is a language incompatibility.

Yeah and even then they have different goals, histories, and incompatibilities. Pipefitting and residential plumbing are completely different domains despite the abstract similarities.

Our tools are relatively cheap to build and test compared to other fields, so we have a lot more of them.

It's really weird that we keep using construction metaphors when we're talking about software engineering.

when working on a large code base, I found it productive to take a slow walk outdoors to some urban construction site, with all of the action that involves. Also I have done serious construction myself in the past. Construction terms, analogies and tooling names make a lot of sense to me when thinking about software systems some days.

Oh trust me, I get it. I think it can be a helpful tool, certainly; but making an equivocation between the two, then holding a trial for the discipline of software engineering for performing poorly in a rigged comparison strikes me as a poor use of one's time.

That's the point that I was trying to make (and likely, what I should've just said in the first place.)

> Can you imagine if different contractors building houses in the same neighborhood all spoke 7 different languages?

I don’t know about 7, but depending on where you live there certainly may be 3 or more.

> It's really weird that we all don't just use one language.

I’m so glad we don’t. I love my preferred stack and I know there are others who’d never ever want to use it; someone would be very unhappy.

Not all screwdrivers, drills, saws, or computer languages serve equally well for all purposes.

Programming languages are more like tools. It would be weird if a plumber and an architect needed exactly the same tools.

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