Lambda the Ultimate

Did anybody else get the same vibe from the Dijkstra paragraph?

I got that vibe from much of the piece. It seemed superficial and random to me. I thought it was particularly weird that after haranguing about trivial syntax wars and overzealous proselytizing, the author goes on to proselytize Lisp. I wouldn't recommend this article to anyone looking for insight into the subject, at any level, except maybe the brief part which gives a classification of languages — but that's not useful enough on its own.

[Edit: BTW, I'm not criticizing the posting of the article here; it's always interesting to see this kind of thing in more mainstream media. But I think programming languages need better PR than this!]

The thing really missing from this piece is any indication of why this all matters. When someone asks me why I do programming language tools as a hobby, I usually quip something like "Because if no one does, somewhere around 2037 the majority of human systems will collapse under the weight of cascading bugs. Such programmers as survive will not be looked kindly upon." It's a joke, but in the immortal words of Homer Simpson "It's funny because it's true"

Some indication of the stakes involved, if only in terms of productivity and costs of mistakes, would have be welcome. An outsider could easily conclude that there's nothing going on in languages work beyond fashion.

Speaking of Cobol, I read Stop Bashing Cobol last night, and I was mightily suprised and horrified.

Maybe this could happen only in the Netherlands. Accepting the socio-technical facts instead of falling in utopian hysterie ( "Please lets do the ultimate language..." ) which is ubiquious among programmers and having fun with refactoring and improving legacy systems/languages. I'm not planning to learn Cobol but those researchers are really my guys.