What I want from a programming language (by alaric)
Then I went to University, and I started working, and I had to code in Perl and PHP and Java. I learnt Python because I didn't like Perl. PHP was nice because it was easy to add to HTML files in a file system and let Apache pass it to mod_php, and had a useful standard library, but the language sucks. Java had good libraries, a clean design, and reflection - except that the libraries contained traces of an earlier data structures library they'd abandoned (Enumeration and all that), which left a lot of mess. I recently learnt Ruby, too, because the recent interest in Ruby on Rails has lead to me having to work with it. I think it's a crying shame that the guy didn't just donate his time to the Python community to fix the few things Ruby does better than Python, rather than writing a whole different language (with some flaws that Python lacks)... but c'est la vie.
But recently, reading Paul Graham's writings has made me start to hanker for programming languages built the way I like. I'm going to see if I can use some Common Lisp in my personal and professional development, now I've finally studied it in detail.
But still, nothing out there's my ideal language. Meaning, I'll have to write it myself...
Mon 16th Apr 2007 10:41 am 
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