14 Mar
2023
14 Mar
'23
8:56 p.m.
Is TUHS still the right place for this discussion?
On Tue, Mar 14, 2023, at 12:48, John Cowan wrote:
On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 3:24 PM Luther Johnson <luther(a)makerlisp.com> wrote:
I'm talking more about where the intent is
to invest languages with more "safety", "good practices", to bake
certain preferences into language features, so that writers no longer recognize these as
engineering choices, and the language as a means of expression of any choice we might
make, but that the language has built-in "the right way" to do things, and if
the program compiles and runs at all, then it must be safe and working in certain
respects.
ORLY? Do you reject C, then, because it does not support self-modifying code or the
ability to jump into the middle of a procedure without going through the prologue? These
are baked-in preferences, and if a C program compiles at all, you can be sure that it does
neither of these things, even if it would benefit your program greatly if they were
available.
Some people would say that's exactly what
the new dialects bring us, but I see too much artificial orthodoxy invented last week, and
too many declarations of the "one true way", in many of the most recent
languages, for my taste.
Since you agree that it is a matter of taste, there can of course be no disputing it.