Comment by rand0m4r
6 months ago
This was an interesting read and very educational in my case, but each time I read an article criticizing a programming language it's written by someone who hasn't done anything better.
It's a shame because it is just as effective as pissing in the wind.
If you're saying someone can't credibly criticize a language without having designed a language themselves, I'll ask that you present your body of work of programming language criticisms so I know if you have "produced something better" in the programming language criticism space.
Of course, by your reasoning this also means you yourself have designed a language.
I'll leave out repeating your colorful language if you haven't done any of these things.
> If you're saying someone can't credibly criticize a language without having designed a language themselves
Actually I think that's a reasonable argument. I've not designed a language myself (other than toy experiments) so I'm hesitant to denigrate other people's design choices because even with my limited experience I'm aware that there are always compromises.
Similarly, I'm not impressed by literary critics whose own writing is unimpressive.
Who would be qualified to judge their those critics’ writing as good or bad? Critics already qualified as good writers? Who vetted them, then? It’d have to be a stream of certified good authors all the way back.
No, I stick by my position. I may not be able to do any better, but I can tell when something’s not good.
(I have no opinion on Go. I’ve barely used it. This is only on the general principle of being able to judge something you couldn’t do yourself. I mean, the Olympics have gymnastic judges who are not gold medalists.)
I’ve never been a rock star, but I think Creed sucks.
I really don’t like your logic. I’m not a Michelin chef, but I’m qualified to say that a restaurant ruined my dessert. While I probably couldn’t make a crème brûlée any better than theirs, I can still tell that they screwed it up compared to their competitor next door.
For example, I love Python, but it’s going to be inherently slow in places because `sum(list)` has to check the type of every single item to see what __add__ function to call. Doesn’t matter if they’re all integers; there’s no way to prove to the interpreter that a string couldn’t have sneaked in there, so the interpreter has to check each and every time.
See? I’ve never written a language, let alone one as popular as Python, but I’m still qualified to point out its shortcomings compared to other languages.
> See? I’ve never written a language, let alone one as popular as Python, but I’m still qualified to point out its shortcomings compared to other languages.
You kind of undermine your argument here, because someone experienced in building languages wouldn't identify this as a shortcoming of Python compared to other languages, but rather a design choice that was made to support other features; designing a language is all about making these tradeoffs to achieve specific design goals. It's one thing to keep boxed values around and be slow because of it -- it's another to do so because you want to support a dynamic type system.
This might be what the other poster was getting at when they said they don't want to listen to non-experts here, because the criticisms are usually shallow and based on personal programming preferences rather than an actual critique of language design.
Anyone would identify that as a shortcoming, albeit one deemed worthwhile giving the flexibility it brings to the table. It’s certainly not an advantage of the language to have to do that slow check on every operation. It’s just a downside to all the dynamism we enjoy.
Also, I said I didn’t write a language. I never said that I didn’t maintain my own local fork so I could play with the VM and add opcodes to it and see what happens if I try experiments like “assume that all(type(_) is type(list[0])) for _ in list[i..])”, which I’ve done just for fun to see how it’d explode when that assumption fails.
But no, I haven’t written a language of my own, I apparently I’m not qualified to have an opinion.
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