It's important to note that if we all stated *all* of our premises before every conclusion, we wouldn't be able to argue effectively with our hands so crippled from overtyping =). No, instead, we use a set base of assumptions -- or a ridiculous assumption like my own statement -- and see which parts of it the other party takes issue with. Then we clarify and re-clarify until we get to immutable core principles (and a set of extrapolations based on them) or uncover fallacies. It would be ridiculous for us to specify *every* assumption simply because different sets of people take issue with different assumptions for different reasons.
By all means! Be my guest -- and I'll either clarify why such ridiculous points don't fit the premises, or alter my premises, or point out fallacies, etc. I don't see it as mockery at all, unless it is done continually with no eye towards giving it some intelligent thought.
I agree, and I think this is a good system for rating programming languages in general. Note the underlined portion of this quote: Some languages by necessity must consider more than this (unfortunately) idealistic view. C++, for example, wished to draw from the large body of C users out there. These users absolutely had to have a compiled system because of the large amount of systems programming and performance considerations attributed to the previous language, which makes it very difficult for dynamics. Java is facing the same problems that C++ faced many years ago: Do you keep the cruft and make new versions of the language backwards compatible, or do you do away with it and risk alienating former users of the language? The C++ Standards committee has been bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility. What I'm trying to say is that every language has a set of unique considerations over and above the goal of producing good or bad code; that producing good or bad code, while an important consideration, is something that must be balanced against other important considerations.
These other considerations particularly shine in the mud community. Because of the backwards compatibility with C, a coder can port their source over to take advantage of certain features (like strings, linked list objects that are decoupled from the object they store, and constructors/destructors to initialize memory and subsequently free it) while still maintaining the large body of code that they have already written.
I wouldn't say that a language with few features is irritating =). I've been enjoying greatly my time with a ridiculously simple (but still quite powerful) language called =).
Great! I'm glad we agree =). My only goal is recognizance that one language is not best suited for all purposes. Even languages like Brain**** are useful for modeling how one needs to do things on a pure Turing machine.
Right, that's what I usually go by. I don't expect someone to literally fully know a language -- that would be pretty silly =). But it's easy to tell people that have achieved a certain mastery over a language. They can generally sense if something's not right in the code, and lookup the answer to solve most problems they have.
|