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What Languages Fix

paulgraham.com

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For scientific computing:

Matlab: it takes way too much Fortran code to solve Ax=b

Octave: Matlab is closed-source (and expensive)

Julia: Matlab was designed by people who knew a lot more about numerical analysis than programming language design

Python + SciPy: you don't actually need a whole new language just to solve Ax=b

TeX: it's taking too long for people to typeset my books

LaTeX: It's taking too long to typeset my books in TeX.

Markdown: XML sucks for writing things by hand

R: because Perl isn't dangerous enough

Surely you mean NumPy, not SciPy.

Yes, that's a good point. I guess for SciPy you'd have to add "and plot the results"?

Actually for TeX it is “modern math typesetting is ugly”:

In the late 1970s, Donald Knuth was revising the second volume of his multivolume magnum opus The Art of Computer Programming, got the galleys, looked at them, and said (approximately) "blecch"! He had just received his first samples from the new typesetting system of the publisher's, and its quality was so far below that of the first edition of Volume 2 that he couldn't stand it.

http://www.tug.org/whatis.html

R: Another Octave

TOML: Because INI files, JSON and YAML parsers are either too hard to read or write sane parsers for (It's not a language, but hey data formats are people too.)

Elixir: Because I want to be a Ruby hipster and an Erlang hipster at the same time (I'm only a lowly Ruby hipster.)

> Octave: Matlab is closed-source (and expensive)

We're GNU. We don't care so much about the closed/open distinction as we care about the free/non-free distinction. The goal is that you should be able to run and share your code without anyone's permission.

I'm also planning to make Octave expensive as well. :-) Hopefully I'll manage to get this Octave startup off the ground.

Thanks for clarifying. And, just to be clear, I'm a big fan of Octave! I used it extensively in my last project, and it worked great.

In case you hadn't heard this rant before, I happen to agree with it ;-)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

S-plus: stats needs a real but dedicated language R: S-plus isn't free or enough like lisp

Rust: I can still compile code that I wrote three months ago.

Go: Haskell code is too generic.

D: "(C++)++" has terrible SEO.

Java (early versions): C is so fast that nobody wants to buy our new chips.

Scala: Java doesn't have map, reduce, or lambdas.

Java 8: Oh crap, Scala's right.

OMHO More like:

Java: Lets make C++ simpler and safer for the average bear, and give them a large standard library.

Go: Lets take an OO subset from Java, duck typing from Python, CSP and glue it all together with memory-safe subset of C that is garbage collected.

How would Clojure be described in these terms? Java is too static/verbose?

Edit, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6968775

Some suggestions:

@tensor wrote: "Clojure: lisp promotes mutability too much."

@ajuc: "The JVM needs a good lisp."

My take would be: I want to work in the areas where Java is used, but not use Java.

For that there are already several good, stable JVM lisps, though. I assume people are moving to Clojure because they specifically want Clojure, not just a lisp on the JVM; otherwise the more conservative choice would be to use ABCL (if you want CL) or Kawa (if you want Scheme).

For me clojure is more about wonderful community (like ruby's one) and real projects (because of java libraries)

Clojure: Java is too complected.

"Clojure: I want to use Lisp, and I want to actually have libraries that can get stuff done"

Clojure: I like Lisp, but it needs more syntax. Clojure: I like Java backtraces. /s

Clojure: If ()'s is good, let's add []'s and {}'s.

Why does PG not put a post date on his posts??? Maybe so people keep thinking it something new?

PHP originally: We only need a few functions, not real language.

PHP now: We need every feature of every language ever invented. Twice.

People are not scared of lisp syntax. They just don't recognise it. First impressions really count. If somebody doesn't even recognise something at first glance then the vast majority of then aren't going to engage with it further. The people who are left are not enough to make something popular. Why don't they recognise it? - Because it's not familiar. Every child learns mathematics in school. In mathematics the convention is f(x) = 2x + 1. The function name is outside the brackets and the parameters are within. Names are important and names of things generally tend to be on the outside. Think about the name of a restaurant, a town, a house, a car manufacturer's badge, a box of cornflakes, filing cabinet drawers, folders in the filing cabinet etc. etc. All of these names or labels are on the outside of the object. Most people aren't afraid of lisp syntax they just don't even recognise it enough to engage with it further.

Somehow XML became popular despite being syntactically very close to sexps... Why do you think XML succeeded where sexps failed?

XML was all about encoding data, not computations. It's far easier to understand data storage than computation. Lisp becomes scary once you start computing and having functional/recursive calls. Look at prolog. Prolog's data storage is very easy for anyone to grasp. dog(fido). man(john), man(dave). The moment, you start computing with prolog recursively, most folks throw up and are ready to stick to their procedural/imperative style.

How often do most people write XML?

> Why do you think XML succeeded where sexps failed?

Because it was superficially confortable given HTML and its popularity due to the explosion of the web.

Cosmetics are often more important than substantive structure in popularity.

People are overwhelmed by lisp syntax, because they see all the ((()) () ()) Instead of seeing the structure.

Clojure: Lisp could use more [] and {}

Syntax helps readability of structure. Lisp fails at this compared to other languages. Its simple, consistent syntax does help with some types of problems but those aren't the ones that dominate most people's daily programming needs.

Haskell: Programming is not enough like abstract algebra.

I've always thought of Haskell as a programming language for people who prefer maths to programming.

I think for the crowd you described, why not use Prolog? Prolog's idea is very much like what Math is to me (I only have a undergrad math degree, so don't count what I think is by any means absolutely correct)- here are some truth/axioms, can you deduce further theorems, and give result whether certain statements are true or false.

As far as I can tell, doing production work in Prolog would be an order of magnitude more difficult than doing production work in Haskell. This is just a guess, as I only have experience with the latter. This is similar to the reason we don't use Idris, Shen, and so on (yet!)

The problem with Prolog is that to get reasonably performant code at all you have to understand the underlying unification algorithm and manipulate it using cuts to limit backtracking. This means that you have to break the core abstractions of the language in order to do anything, which defeats the purpose of logic programming.

Functional programming in Haskell makes it fairly easy to write fast code, though Haskell in particular is tricky to reason about space-wise (due to laziness).

This characterisation of Haskell bugs me a lot, because most reputable mathematicians would have nothing to do with Haskell either. The mathematical parts of Haskell seem to attract logicians, not general mathematicians. General mathematiicians much prefer Sage or Mathematica.

Don't get me wrong, Haskell is a great language, but it's not very "mathematical". It just has terrible ambassadors that give the impression that category theory and Haskell are synonymous. They're not, Haskell has its own breed of categeory theory that I prefer to call Haskellory theory.

This is a reasonable introduction to Haskell that does away with that Haskegorical nonsense:

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

>It just has terrible ambassadors that give the impression that category theory and Haskell are synonymous

It isn't ambassadors doing that, it is detractors.

>This is a reasonable introduction to Haskell that does away with that Haskegorical nonsense

Note that one of the authors, Don Stewart is almost certainly the biggest haskell ambassador in the history of the language. Which reinforces my other statement quite nicely.

> most reputable mathematicians would have nothing to do with Haskell either

Really? Is that because they don't like Haskell, or because they don't like programming in general?

A little bit of both, but just because Haskell is so weird and different for most people, including most mathematicians.

You might think of it that way, but it doesn't reflect reality at all.

Seems like all the programmers who can't go a paragraph without mentioning the importance of "abstraction" got what they asked for.

There's abstraction and then there's abstraction. One of the benefits of Haskell is that it actually uses good abstractions rather than leaky ad-hoc ones. Making a Car an instance of Vehicle is not a good abstraction. Making a List an instance of Monoid is.

Then noting that List is isomorphic to the initial Monoid is great abstraction. When you know what that means you have leverage over a large number of valuable properties for both functionality and performance.

Wait...how do I model my car in Haskell? Assume I'm writing a game with things on the screen that might be called objects. The FRP solution would be just to dump all the signals into a bunch of switches, no modeling at all basically.

List is a nice collection if I'm using my built-in support for human language. I'd never call it as a monodic to my wife (or anybody else I care about).

It seems that some people, while going on and on about 'abstractions' and the importance of it, really just want cute metaphors. As soon as they encounter abstractions from the 'premiere' field of abstract reasoning and concept, they're appelled.

Originally, it seems it was closer to

Miranda: Lazy evaluation should be the default.

Haskell: Miranda is closed-source.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

Can someone add (2002) to the title?

Two of the older posts of this article did say it was old:

1. From that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58444

2. Says (old article): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288749

3. Says (2002): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4954663

and 4. unqualified https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6968775

Seems to me those are goals, not fixes. I'd like to see a list that matches languages to problems and domains.

Logo: I like turtles

It's still no surprise that some of the most powerful languages on that list are so because they didn't really "attack" other languages. Lisp and Prolog.

Erlang - because software contains bugs and computers fail

the list left off perhaps the most important language for the web: javascript. and my proposed "problem" for it:

web pages are not programmable.

It's only the most important one as it's the only one we're allowed to use.

More like: Can functional paradigms be used in a procedural language

I think spot's formulation is closer to the original intent. The purpose was to create a language for web pages, not an exploration of functional paradigms in procedural languages.

By the time Javascript was designed, having first-class functions or closures was not a radical concept. It had not penetrated to the mainstream languages yet, but it was already to the point where they were very nearly the last holdouts.

Beyond that, Javascript did not particularly ship with any sophisticated FP stuff, and, really, doesn't even ship with any today. It may be nice that Underscore can be written, but for any language with any functional pretensions whatsoever, it shouldn't need to be written, because it ought to just be shipped with the stock language.

Or more narrowly, can Self be made to look like Java?

We don't want to rely on Java Applets or Flash

It's actually in the source of the page, just commented out:

    Javascript: Java is scary.

Also hidden in the source:

    Python: Modula-3 is scary.
    Curl: Lisp syntax is scary, and XML is redundant.
    Arc: Scheme has no libraries, and both could be denser.

    There are a lot of languages I haven't been able to figure out
    how to describe this way. Suggestions would be appreciated about any         
    languages missing from the list. What I'm looking for is not exactly what
    motivated the language designer (Smalltalk was originally intended
    for children) but what niche the language first lodged in.  What was
    the appeal of the language to its first users?

Or:

Is possible to create a monoculture on top of a badly (non)designed language with not chance in hell to escape it?

Kernel: Scheme macros aren't first-class.

Answer-set programming: Prolog doesn't have well-defined declarative semantics.

Surely Java should be more like:

Because when I get a int, it should definitely be a bloody int.

More like: "we failed to notice the mistake C made of giving stupid meaningless names to types, rather than introducing meaningful names like int16, int32, int64."

When you say "int", you should get an integer - not an element of a (decided by the author arbitrarily) finite subset of integers.

C# version N: C# version N-1 would be more awesome if it had...

C# - Java is too low-level.

F# - C# is too low level and a kludge.

F#: Because C# needs something new to steal from.

I like to see one of these for web languages / frameworks

Objective C: C is too low level and C++ is too static.

I noticed a typo:

C: Assemby language is too low-level.

PHP: C++ ain't good for the web.

Groovy: Someone else controls Rails.

PHP: I can do this better than ASP. Wait, I can't.

PHP was created before ASP. And it wasn't intended to be a full programming language.

Don't take me too seriously. Programmers like to joke, too ;)

In many ways a new programming language is similar to a a new product bashing its predecessor in able to position itself as a more superior alternative.

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