Comment by librasteve

6 days ago

In the last years, simplistic languages such as Python and Go have “made the case” that complexity is bad, period. But when humans communicate expertly in English (Shakespeare, JK Rowling, etc) they use its vast wealth of nuance, shading and subtlety to create a better product. Sure you have to learn all the corners to have full command of the language, to wield all that expressive power (and newcomers to English are limited to the shallow end of the pool). But writing and reading are asymmetrical and a more expressive language used well can expose the code patterns and algorithms in a way that is easier for multiple maintainers to read and comprehend. We need to match the impedance of the tool to the problem. [I paraphrase Larry Wall, inventor of the gloriously expressive https://raku.org]

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librasteve

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grey-area  6 days ago

Not sure how I feel about Shakespeare and JK Rowling living in the same parenthesis!

Computer languages are the opposite of natural languages - they are for formalising and limiting thought, the exact opposite of literature. These two things are not comparable.

If natural language was so good for programs, we’d be using it - many many people have tried from literate programming onward.

  • palata  6 days ago

    Natural languages are ambiguous, and that's a feature. Computer languages must be unambiguous.

    I don't see a case for "complex" vs "simple" in the comparison with natural languages.

  • librasteve  6 days ago

    I fully accept that formalism is an important factor in programming language design. But all HLLs (well, even ASM) are a compromise between machine speak (https://youtu.be/CTjolEUj00g?si=79zMVRl0oMQo4Tby) and human speak. My case is that the current fashion is to draw the line at an overly simple level, and that there are ways to wrap the formalism in more natural constructs that trigger the parts of the brain that have evolved to hanle language (nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and so on).

    Here's a very simple, lexical declaration made more human friendly by use of the preposition `my` (or `our` if it is packaged scoped)...

      my $x = 42;

    • grey-area  5 days ago

      Have you looked at all the previous attempts?

      Your example is not compelling I’m afraid but you should try building a language to see. Also read literate programming if you haven’t already.

  • h3lp  4 days ago

    Literate programming is not about programming in natural languages: it's about integrating code (i.e. the formal description in some DSL) with the meta-code such as comments, background information, specs, tests, etc.

    BTW, one side benefit of LP is freedom from arbitrary structure of DSLs. A standard practice in LP is to declare and define objects in the spot in which they are being used; LP tools will parse them out and distribute to the syntactically correct places.

    • grey-area  4 days ago

      Well I think the ambition was to have as much as possible in natural language, with macros calling out to ‘hidden’ code intended for machines. So I do think there is a good link with later attempts to write using natural language and make computer languages more human-friendly and he was one of the first to have this idea.

      Neither strategy has had much success IMO.

  • tom_m  5 days ago

    Exactly. I mean think about the programming languages used in aircraft and such. There's reasons. It all depends on what people are willing to tolerate.

integralid  6 days ago

>But writing and reading are asymmetrical and a more expressive language used well can expose the code patterns and algorithms in a way that is easier for multiple maintainers to read and comprehend.

It's exactly the opposite. Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.

It's easy to introduce a lot of complexity and clever hacks, because as the author you understand it. But good code is readable for people, and that's why very expressive languages like perl are abhorred.

  • librasteve  6 days ago

    > Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.

    I 100% agree with your statement. My case is that a simple language does not necessarily result in simpler and more readable code. You need a language that fits the problem domain and that does not require a lot of boilerplate to handle more complex structures. If you are shoehorning a problem into an overly simplistic language, then you are fighting your tool. OO for OO. FP for FP. and so on.

    I fear that the current fashion to very simple languages is a result of confusing these aspects and by way of enforcing certain corporate behaviours on coders. Perhaps that has its place eg Go in Google - but the presumption that one size fits all is quite a big limitation for many areas.

    The corollary of this is that richness places an burden of responsibility on the coder not to write code golf. By tbh you can write bad code in any language if you put your mind to it.

    Perhaps many find richness and expressivity abhorrent - but to those of us who like Larry's thinking it is a really nice, addictive feeling when the compiler gets out of the way. Don't knock it until you give it a fair try!

spongebobism  6 days ago

Perlis's 10th epigram feels germane:

> Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.

  • librasteve  5 days ago

    Well sure - being in a rut is good. But the language is the medium in which you cast your idiom, right?

    Here's a Python rut:

      n = 20  # how many numbers to generate
  a, b = 0, 1
  for _ in range(n):
    print(a, end=" ")
    a, b = b, a + b
  print()

    Here's that rut in Raku:

      (0,1,*+*...*)[^20]

    I am claiming that this is a nicer rut.

    • zephen  5 days ago 

        seq = [0,1]
  while len(seq) < 20:
      seq.append(sum(seq[-2:]))
  print(' '.join(str(x) for x in seq))

      > I am claiming that (0,1,+...*)[^20] is a nicer rut.

      If it's so fantastic, then why on earth do you go out of your way to add extra lines and complexity to the Python?

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