From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2009-02-26T08:14:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Nexus Programming Language

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On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 09:41:56AM +0900, Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>=20
> There seems to be a fairly clean divide between the folks who like =20
> language for being language, and those who like language for the =20
> specific things it can do. I'll admit that I'm one of the former and =20
> some of my favourite programs have minimal value in the latter sense, =20
> but the form of them makes my heart soar.

Meh.  I'm pretty big on both.  I guess I'm neither an "ass man" nor a
"breast man", but more of a "total package man".  Pray pardon my
reference to a crude, but common, idiom by way of analogy.


>=20
> After years of battling with VB, C++ and Java the discovery of Ruby =20
> was one of those doh! moments. I haven't looked back :)
> Ruby and beauty are not always synonymous - it very much depends on =20
> the writer - but it's a language that I find it hard to be ugly in and =
=20
> that I think is a wonderful property.

I love Ruby.  Ironically, though, I seem to be going in the other
direction, somewhat -- getting (back) into C a bit more now.


>=20
> But then again I've seen beautiful code in C and Assembler, even in =20
> Pascal (see my favourite book, Programming Languages: An Interpreter-=20
> based Approach for some wonderful examples) and perhaps one day I'll =20
> see beautiful code in Nexus. That alone will be justification enough =20
> for the love and effort its developers are pouring into it.

I have to guess you haven't seen beautiful C code using the GNU style
guide.  That stuff makes me shudder, as does the ritual abuse of GCC
specific compiler features.


>=20
> As for Common Lisp, it reminds me of Esperanto: those who are =20
> attracted to it seem often to be those least suited to using it =20
> gracefully and perhaps that says more about them than the language =20
> itself.

That's an analogy I hadn't considered before.  I guess, if CL is like
Esperanto, Ruby is like Japanese, Perl is like American English, Python
is like English as spoken in India, and Scheme is a bit like Toki Pona.

Of those, Toki Pona and Japanese are by far my favorites, in terms of the
basic structures of the various languages, but American English is the
language with which I'm still the most comfortable, the most fluent, and
the most expressive.

I'm not sure where C would fit into all that.


>=20
> We abandon the quest for beauty at our peril as it is the keenest =20
> guide to correctness that we possess. Unfortunately an age of =20
> aesthetic relativism has given it a bum wrap by attributing its =20
> quality to things which patently aren't beautiful and are far from =20
> correct.

quoth Rainer Maria Rilke:

    "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are
    barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely
    disdains to destroy us."

--=20
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
Quoth Edmund Burke: "Your representative owes you, not his industry
only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he
sacrifices it to your opinion."

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