A lazy and flippant classification of programming languages | Hacker News Reader

A lazy and flippant classification of programming languages

blog.brycekerley.net

83 pointslemper19 comments

My all-time favorite flippant description of a programming language: someone once described Java as "a domain-specific language for converting XML files to stack traces."

Surely we can be more flippant than that. There are three-ish types of languages:

C, Assembly: begrudging respect, they are ok for writing kernels (operating system and compute, respectively).

FORTRAN: the point of computers is to do math, why do you need any other language than the language for FORmula TRANslation?

Other languages: Bad.

Honorable mention: Matlab/Octave or Numpy because I can’t be arsed to use a proper language while prototyping. But you can also use them in REPL mode so really they are halfway between a programming language and a UI.

'At scale' numpy is often faster and safer than your other choices because CUDA is pretty much a magic sauce for your numerical programming needs.

Does numpy have a cuda backend without numba?

Cupy covers some of Numpy and some Scipy. IIRC you can even get it working by just changing the import and adding a little boilerplate, in some cases.

I love SQL on it's own there. Where would Prolog, DataLog & Lisp fall?

I'd classify Prolog and Datalog as L(ogic) languages.

Lisp not sure, maybe H for homoiconic.

Sad not to see any lisps or APL but in his defense it does say lazy :)

Elixir and Erlang not being E-languages completely ruins this post.

Swift is an honorary C language. Fortran is an emeritus C language.

I feel like Swift falls into the G camp since that's where Rust & Go are and Swift is of a similar evolutionary branch.

Swift would be the one ring to rule them all, from assembly builtin's to ORM's, running from 32-bit controllers and secure enclave to automatic differentiation on internet-scale fp16 models... if it weren't for Xcode...

I have no idea how developers for the apple ecosystem get anything done. If Xcode doesn't crash it's because it is too busy glitching out instead.

Think it is a miss to have F-Languages not mention F#

computers

no thanks!

I'm sorry

Curious how Smalltalk fits in.

That’s a brief list. This video goes into more detail:

“Yet Another ULTIMATE Programming Languages Tier List (2024)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQccsZpEgYY&t=91s

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