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Comment by duesabati

2 days ago

I completely disagree with the post.

All programming languages are equivalent meaning their level of expressiveness is the same, it's not an opinion it's a fact. Each language comes with its runtime and its peculiarities but potentially you can always make any feature that another language runtime has with any language, even though probably not with the same performance and efficiency has been that feature native to the runtime itself.

So there are no "more powerful languages" just runtimes that allow you to hide away some stuff considered stable enough that they become some kind of primitive for the programmer, now we may have different opinions on what elegant code is, but personally I'd like to avoid code that directly (i.e. no kind of abstraction) relies on runtime features and instead express clearly my intention in code, but I recognize the productivity gains.

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duesabati

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Verdex  2 days ago

You may be thinking of turing completeness. All turing complete languages can compute the same functions. And in that way they are equivalent.

However, not all languages are turing complete. See, for example, charity: https://github.com/dobesv/charity

Furthermore, turing completeness says nothing about expressiveness or capability. Imagine a language that has no IO. Such a language would be able to compute any function any other language can but not do anything viewable by the rest of the world. So obviously not equivalent.

And w.r.t. expressiveness, there is some academic research into how to quantify that: https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/scp91-felleisen.pdf

  • duesabati  2 days ago

    I understand and agree, what I was trying to say is that one should not confine ones thinking by the constraints of a tool, would it be a programming language or whole framework, but to express everything as freely as possible without details of implementation only then one can go deeper and add concreteness that brings its set of constraints and all of this should be possible in any programming languages.

    I hope I've cleared my standpoint.

patrickmay  2 days ago

Are you familiar with https://paulgraham.com/avg.html?

  • duesabati  2 days ago

    No I wasn't, it was a really interesting read thank you, but that blog post seem to me like an argument for me not the OP point of view, because if you refuse to understand how things work by blindly delegating to libraries and frameworks (like RoR) you become a "Blub" programmer that thinks in the way of constructs and decisions that the library/framework authors made.