DonHopkins 10 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do ab...

That's exactly Jeff Atwood's point, which I quoted above (and will repeat here): "From my perspective, the point of all these "PHP is broken" rants is not just to complain, but to help educate and potentially warn off new coders starting new codebases. Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP despite the madness, unquestionably. But now we need to work together to fix what is broken. The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious." -Jeff Atwood

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/

Leaning hard into the IDE (or ChatGPT these days) because your language design is flawed is a hella/totally stereotypical "West Coast" thing to do, as described in "Evolution of Lisp", "Worse is Better", and "History of T", and exemplified by Interlisp and Warren Teitelman's "pervasive philosophy of user interface design" and implementation of "DWIM".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM

https://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/DWIM.HTML

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6492j904

If your language isn't terribly designed, then your IDE doesn't have to be such a complex non-deterministic Rube Goldberg machine, papering over the languages flaws, haphazardly guessing about your intent, "yelling at you" all the time about potential foot-guns and misunderstandings.

As you might guess, I'm firmly in the "East Coast" MacLisp / Emacs camp, because that's what I learned to program in the 80's. I can't stand most IDEs (except for the original Lisp Machines, and Emacs of course), especially when they keep popping up hyperactive completion menus that steal the keyboard input focus and spew paragraphs of unexpected boilerplate diarrhea into my buffer whenever I dare to type ahead quickly and hit return.

But my point is that you can have and should demand the best of both coasts, unless you start off with a Shitty West Coast Programming Language or a Shitty East Coast IDE.

(Of course those philosophies are no longer bound to the geographical coasts they're named after, that's just how those papers describe their origin.)

Jeff Atwood's point an my point is that we should demand both well designed programming languages AND well designed IDEs, not make excuses for and paper over the flaws of shitty ones.

There are historic existence proofs, like Lisp Machines and Smalltalk, and we should be able to do much better now, instead of getting stuck in the past with Lisp or PHP.

I mentioned the East/West Coast dichotomy in the discussion about the conversation between Guido, James, Anders and Larry:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568860

>DonHopkins on April 4, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: A Conversation with Language Creators: Guido, Jame...

>Anders Hejlsberg also made the point that types are documentation. Programming language design is user interface design because programmers are programming language users.

>"East Coast" MacLisp tended to solve problems at a linguistic level that you could hack with text editors like Emacs, while "West Cost" Interlisp-D tended to solve the same problems with tooling like WYSIWYG DWIM IDEs.

>But if you start with a well designed linguistically sound language (Perl, PHP and C++ need not apply), then your IDE doesn't need to waste so much of its energy and complexity and coherence on papering over problems and making up for the deficiencies of the programming language design. (Like debugging mish-mashes of C++ templates and macros in header files!)

More discussion of West Coast -vs- East Coast language design:

Evolution of Lisp:

https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/Evolution-of...

Worse is Better:

https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

History of T:

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html?viewfullsite=1

The Interlisp Programming Environment

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/ics228s2006/teitelmanmasinter....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966328

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966399

>gruseom on June 30, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf]

>Interlisp was the so-called "west coast" Lisp that emphasized an interactive programming environment and in retrospect looks more like a hybrid between Smalltalk and Lisp than modern Lisp implementations. It was developed at PARC for a while. I don't know if there was cross-pollination between Interlisp and Smalltalk or if the similarity was a zeitgeist thing.

>This article talks about the design values of the system and communicates the flavour of what a Smalltalkish Lisp would have been like.

>As someone who's only read about this, I'd be interested in hearing from people who actually used it.