In defense of complicated programming languages

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  • zig

    General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

    I would like to bring up some counter-examples:

    - 1. Generators that can allocate prevent comptime-overapproximation of potential stack usage (https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/157#issuecomment-76395...) or make analysis inside the compiler significant harder.

  • go

    The Go programming language

    > There is something in video games called minmaxing, which is where you maximize one attribute at the expense of all of the others. For me C++, and now Rust, feel like they are guilty of this with their weight on zero-cost abstractions.

    > I think it was literally just meant to be the bare minimum to try to solve the most important parts of the problem, and at that it succeeds.

    In other words, it's the cost effectiveness of a language feature. You want features to provide as much value for as little cost as possible. This is what Go's going for; to paraphrase Russ Cox - "If a feature is not clearly above the bar, it's below it." [1].

    > Just as reducing programming language complexity doesn’t remove it, but only moves it around, removing runtime cost doesn’t remove it either. And the problem here isn’t that compile time isn’t a better time than runtime; it’s the hidden costs that suck. Sure, maybe the compile times in Rust will improve, and maybe it’s not even that big of a deal. But every little feature the language has puts some additional stress on the ecosystem. The language server has to bear this load, for example.

    The worst hidden cost that's often missed is the impact on the programmer.

    Take Python's controversial walrus operator [2]. If you look at the reasoning and the examples, the change seems reasonable. But consider that once the feature gets implemented, every single Python programmer will have to learn what it does in order to be able to read others' code. Does this feature provide enough to justify this weight? Undoubtedly not. Of course, it got implemented anyway, because the impact of making the code slightly more readable in some cases is clearly visible, but the cost incurred on every single programmer's mind is not.

    This is how languages reach untenable levels of complexity. By the time you realize your language is getting complex you're 20 features in and it's too late to turn back. "A frog dropped in a pot of boiling water will jump out of the pot to save his own life. If the frog is put into cool water and slowly brought to a boil, he will remain there until he is cooked through."

    [1]: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/47203#discussioncom...

    [2]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572/#abstract

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