C holding a gun: “if you segfault it’s your own fault”
Assembly (Octopus swimming alone since birth): “compiler? what’s a compiler”
Go is like snakes: you’re hatched from an egg and pretty much effective from the get-go. The older you get, the bigger prey you can eat, but otherwise things don’t change much since you were hatched. Your species can thrive in almost any environment, you’re effective, you have all the tools you need straight out of the egg.
Rust is like humans. There’s a huge incubation period, and you’re mostly helpless when you’re born, but the older you get, the more effective you become with the tools nature graced you with. And you, like Thanos, are inevitable, even if it does mean the death of billions.
Python is like beaver. Everyone has an opinion about you: some think you’re cute, some think you’re wierd. You’re perfectly suited to your environment, but things get awkward outside of your natural habitat - you can function, but not as well as when you’re in your comfort zone. And when people encounter you where they’re not expecting, they can be unpeasantly surprised, and you can cause them trouble.
C++ is like platypus. You resemble some other more simple, some might say sane, animal, but developed into a sort of frankenstein monster creature made from a jumble of parts and a stinger that, when it kills someone, comes as a shock. Every part of you serves some purpose, even if it seems tacked-on and out of place.
Then there’s Node. You are everywhere. You are legion. You fill up ecosystems. People try to defend you, claiming that you serve some purpose in the foodchain, but there’s scant evidence. Attempts to eradicate you fail. You often spread deadly disease. You breed, rapidly, persistently, relentlessly. You are widely hated, and yet everwhere.
Edit: typo
So then I guess C is salamander. Also lays eggs and lives by a pool, but doesn’t do anything extra, and is a necessary step before most of the other modern languages.
COBOL is a coelacanth. To everyone’s surprise, they’re still out there. We thought they were an old, very extinct example of a non-terrestrial lobe-finned fish, but they actually hung on in some odd environments. They cause massive indigestion to anyone that has to consume them.
If Node is a mosquito, Javascript itself is another hymenopteran: the yellow jacket wasp. Just as hated, and with a tendency to injure handlers, but widely successful and defended as filling an actual useful role in nature. They build delicate, arguably pretty nests.
Nobody who has seen a yellow jacket nest in person would argue they’re pretty.
I literally have one in a jar on a shelf, actually. I find it kind of delicate and wispy. The inside parts are uglier, but still very interesting.
I especially enjoyed your COBOL metaphor. Nicely done!
These are excellent.
I need to add Perl.
Perl is a honey bee. You are unassuming and pragmatic. You fill every niche. Your buzzing carries meaning, but only to other bees. In theory, your ecosystem niche is filled by many competing solutions that are more fit to purpose. But somehow we all know in our hearts that if you disappear, all life on the planet will probably die soon after.
In other words, node = mosquitoes or invasive ant species?
I thought roach myself.
Roaches don’t spread nearly as much disease as 'squiters, and IIRC are actually important in some ecosystems.
For sure! I was just thinking of a species that’ll outlive humanity. :D
Did I find another Sanderfan in the wild?
If you’re using C++, why not use streams?
Yes, fprintff is a C thing.
Well, that means that it’s also a C++ thing, but streams are an even slicker concept that aren’t a C thing, making higher-level code look nice and shiny - and abstracting away loads of I/O pain points while encapsulating useful features.
C++ streams are ugly in their own right, but C++ preferred practice these days is to treat it as its own language rather than as a C superset. That is, lots of crufty old C stuff still works in C++ for legacy reasons, but using it when you don’t have to is considered inappropriate.
C++ and C compilers are much more friendly now a days
can’t wait to use templates and have the compiler spit out a 120 page autobiography
Rust: “Oh honey you aren’t ready to compile that yet”
as a non programmer, but someone involved in fields intimately similar in fundamental manners.
Honestly i get the feeling that languages and compilers are going to stop babying the user and go RISC-V at some point.
Who needs complex structures and tons of rules when you can just use a turing machine instead!
As a non-surgeon I think doing a heart transplant without bypass shouldn’t be that hard if you’re fast enough. I mean you can cut arteries quickly with bolt cutters right?
You can certainty do this, yet it’s not time- (and hence cost-) efficient.
???
a language with all the good parts of something like assembly, and without all the bad parts of more modern, complex, and “safe” languages.
One major rule for designed functionality is simplicity. The second you add another rule, the amount of things that can happen grows immensely. And that only scales worse the farther you go. The simpler something is, the easier it is to be intimately familiar with it. Which is what allows people to make proper use of something.
Okay, I get it. It makes a lot more sense now. Honestly your first comment was word salad.
I don’t understand. You mean everyone goes back to assembly? I could get on board with that.
think assembly, but without the assembly part.
All the good parts of shit like assembly without all the bad parts of more involved languages like js. Or god forbid front end development frameworks.
You mean C?
pretty much. C but if it was better somehow, basically.
What’s wrong with it? It’s about as close to assembly as you can get.
So like Rust?
Quick, someone come up with PHP
There’s no parent at all. Maybe a tiny confused baby sea turtle.
Something more elegant, come on
I would swap Python with C++. Constantly dealing with stupid runtime errors that could’ve been easily captured during compile time.
Did you forget to rename this one use of the variable at the end of the program? Sucks for you, because I won’t tell you about it until after 30 minutes into the execution.
sure, but thats just outsourcing the problem.
As if that’s a bad thing… it means you’re not locked in with a tool you don’t like and the language itself doesn’t dictate your workflow.
There’s very little benefit and a lot of potential problems in using a single tool for everything.
It’s also a solution…
My brother. That’s why you do unit tests.
And lint
👆 definitely linting first 👆
finding errors as you type is even better than finding errors at compile time
But are you even a real programmer if you don’t test in production?
I shouldn’t need to do unit tests for quick one off scripts
Shouldn’t be forgetting for one off scripts either, if that’s the logic you want to go with.
The tool exists, either you do it or you don’t and end up getting an error until the interpreter hits that line. It’s just the nature of being compiled at runtime.
“Ohh, I got all these numbers I want to crunch using numpy or pandas and plot it using matplotlib. Hold on, I just need to write unit tests first.”
Well. Yeah. That’s test-driven development. It’s a very good practice.
TDD only works well if the problem is clearly specified before the first line of code has been written, which is rarely the case when I need Python for something.
Seriously, in what way does the python interpreter protect you?
You can solve this with git:
git gud
Seriously though, writing a monolith of a function and not testing anything until you run it the first time isn’t the way to go. Even with a compiler you’re only going to catch syntactical and type issues. No compiler in the world is going to tell you you forgot to store your data in the correct variable, although it or a a linter may have helped you realize you weren’t using it anywhere else.
Python was typeless. And it was common to reuse variables with different types of content.
So you at some point never knew what actually is within the variable you are using.
Using typing in python solve 95% of your problems of having runtime errors instead of compile errors
Agreed. Mypy pre-commit hooks are very useful if you’re starting a fresh project. Adding typing to an existing project which reuses variables with different types… We lost weeks to it.
I mean, is C++ any better? Sure, it catches some errors at compile-time, but others can turn into undefined behavior pretty easily.
Catching some errors is better than catching no errors. No compiler in any language can protect you from all runtime errors either way, but some are better at it than others.
Yeesh. I mean, perl would tell you about that immediately, I’m just saying… :-P
Yeah, but then you have to use perl
Using perl is not the problem, now trying to read perl code later? That’s the challenge! :-P
And there’s haskell compiler
Forgot a semicolon? That’s 200 errors
