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Comment by Skroob | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the first point. I think that there are such things as objectively bad languages, and that their use should be avoided. Whether or not C++ or PHP is on the list can be argued ad infinitum, but there isn't any reasonable argument for implementing anything in, to take the most extreme example, Brainfuck.

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Additionally, while the author is correct that a bad developer is a bad developer regardless of toolset, it's much easier to completely fuck everything up in certain languages. It's quite easy to write code that allows for buffer overflows or XSS vulnerabilities in some languages, and not quite so easy in others.

The important thing, to me, is that the language's path of least resistance leads you to The Right Thing. This generally improves quality of life for good devs and reduces the amount of harm bad devs can cause.

I absolutely hate C++ myself, and yet I'm an expert in the language, and I still use it when I need a combination of speed and object-oriented development (which comes up a lot in game development).

So is it an objectively bad language? Arguably. It just happens to be better for some tasks than all the alternatives, giving me code that's "safer" than C, almost as fast as C, and portable to all the platforms I need to target.

One would hope that in light of great compiler tools such as LLVM, different parser generators/toolkits and extensible IDE's we wouldn't be stuck writing code in a languages designed in the early 80's, manually separating definitions in to headers and using preprocessor to "include" files. Every time I see the accretion of junk/legacy design decisions in software get entrenched further (eg. Microsoft pushing for a return to C++) I die a little.

The problem is the huge activation energy required to get people to move to a new language.

Microsoft TRIED to get people to move to a "better" language (C#, which IS arguably better than Java) but the .NET runtime is massive and doesn't ship with existing tablets/phones, meaning it (or rather, Mono) would add 10Mb+ to a download size that needs to stay under 20Mb to download over-the-air (2G/3G/4G).

A lot of people did jump on that bandwagon, but C# isn't really great for games, and so the adoption has been lukewarm outside of the Xbox/Windows Phone development community.

Point is, until someone has created something that really is BETTER than C++ in the ways that it needs to be (which probably requires heavy investment in tools as well as libraries), it's going to be an uphill battle to get people to change.

Even if you had the Perfect Ultimate Language designed an implemented today, you'd need support in everyone's editors, debuggers (including source-level remote debugging support and any necessary server modification on all target platforms), cross-platform build support to all the relevant architectures, C/C++ linkage (unless you plan to rewrite all current libraries), JNI linkage (so you could interoperate with Java, which is required on Android), and support for multiple paradigms (NO single-paradigm language will ever be adopted across the board, nor should it be -- different programming problems are solved best with different paradigms).

Honestly "D" is the language that best fits the bill that I'm aware of, though it has a long way to go as far as support on other platforms and mindshare. I haven't yet USED D, though, so I can't really critique it intelligently.

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