It should be one of the core purposes of a programming language to help humans to write the code they intend. If a language doesnt do that then it's bad.

[–] Shanmugha@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I tend to disagree. The language should allow me to do things, and what is simple and obvious logically should be simple and obvious in the language (I am looking at you, JavaScript with [] != [])

What I intend - well, more than half my work is figuring out what I intend, language should have no say in this, save things like "we do this kind of trick like this here" (for example, C++ has no concept of "interface" entity. Ok, looks like I can use virtual class instead)

It is when languages start trying to be "helpful" they become an ugly mess: meaningful white spaces in Python? The whole shit with prototypes and objects in JS(see above)? Fuck this shit, I am not going to call those two good programming languages

[–] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I think you're saying the same thing as what I am. If it's more complex than what you may think, the language should guard against it. If not, it should make it simple.

Rust, for example, is the only mainstream language where it isn't possible to read from a file handle after it's been closed. Doing so is a compilation failure. This is just a general invariant of "how to use files".

But you also don't need to think about allocating or deallocating memory in Rust. It does that fke you automatically, even though it's not GC.

JS can also be complicated when it tries to hide realities about the world. E.g. is a const array or object immutable? No, the pointer is. But pointers don't exist! /s

[–] Shanmugha@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Looks like we still differ. If something is more complicated than what I may think, then there are some possibilities:

I have not learned to language properly yet (this is where I stand with C++, so no matter how many times I've got segfaults, now is not the time for me to say language is bad)
I have chosen the wrong tool (writing a videoplayer in assembler? something went way wrong here)
tool is actually bad (my rant above goes here. in the sake of making some things easy and simple, something basic in the language got screwed up irrevocably)

And if I managed to try reading from a closed handle, or to access a memory that I am not actually allowed to use, or... (could not get more examples out of the top of my head), it is not the job of the language to slap my hands, as long as I follow the syntax. Most of the time (if not all the time) this means I have not accounted for something that my code allowed to happen - so my responsibility to deal with that

What I keep hearing about Rust is still in the lines of too-much-fucking-care (that's besides obviously dumb rule of "no more than one owner of a variable at any moment" which then had to be worked around because not everything can be done this way. please correct me if I am wrong here)

[–] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yep, we disagree. The world and technology especially is an extremely complicated place. IMO any complex system that is built upon "humans should just know all this complexity and keep it in mind all the time" is fundamentally broken.

[–] Shanmugha@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It depends. We may have our differences in weighing things, but yes, complexity of the system must correlate with complexity of the task it is used for. A system allowing to do things without any complexity means either no complex things to be done or straight up magic