When the revolution comes we need to unify the programming languages (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

66 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Seriously. There’s so many floating around. It feels like there’s a cycle of

Random programmer thinks xyz language sucks -> she/he makes a slightly different, slightly faster, slightly more secure version -> by luck this gains mass adoption-> random programmer thinks new xyz language sucks

I propose when the revolution comes and the last guillotine falls we decide a general-purpose programming language that coders should stick to. I vote Lisp or any of the dialects (scheme, clojure, racket), but i also feel something about the Julia language for scientific research. Maybe we can decriminalize using C. Absolutely ban and hunt down the use of any of the hipster languages teenagers are into these days.

Nim? Zig? Crystal?? I am absolutely losing my damn mind. It compiles to bytecode people. Make up ur damn minds. To jail with all of u

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] space_comrade@hexbear.net 4 points 1 year ago

I can read it if I really focus but even with the nice indentation the syntax doesn't make it easy, it's probably way easier with proper syntax highlighting tho, whatever the Lemmy renderer did here seems wrong.

I still don't really see why I would suffer the syntax over using a more readable language, I've heard this syntax makes the macro system way more elegant/powerful but I can't see it being THAT much better than whatever other languages are doing.

[-] TrashGoblin@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago

So, you do get used to it. The parentheses aren't any more distracting or pervasive than the mix of parentheses and brackets in C-like languages, they're just more uniform. The big syntax difference is that there are no infix operators, only functions.

So, the macro systems in Lisp and its cousins actually are a lot more powerful than text-manipulating macro systems like C. The reason is that without infix operators, and with the syntax being so regular, the structure of the source code is identical to the code's abstract syntax tree. So your macros can effectively manipulate the AST rather than the not-yet-parsed source code. But I don't even really write macros very often, and I still appreciate the consistent syntax compared to the complexity of something like Rust.