raganwald
Thursday, January 17, 2008
  The challenge facing programming language designers
Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.
—Anonymous

And the corollary:

Programming language designers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programing languages, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better programming idiots. So far the Universe is winning.
  2:20 PM

Comments on “The challenge facing programming language designers”:
Know it all bloggers are in a race with the spelling of the word "corollary". So far the latter is winning.
# posted by Blogger Conny : 4:05 PM
 
Did you mean Know-it-all?

:-P
# posted by Blogger Reginald Braithwaite : 4:08 PM
 
The second law of thermodynamics (entropy etc.) dictates that the universe will always win this kind of race.
# posted by Blogger Jon : 7:53 PM
 
There's a good lesson here for why you make decisions when designing a language.

If you add restrictions or remove flexibility, feel free to do so, as long as you aren't doing it to prevent idiots from shooting themselves in the foot. If it makes tools better, standardizes something (e.g. python's whitespace 'restriction'), or helps experts avoid shooting themselves in the foot, go for it.
# posted by Blogger Reinier Zwitserloot : 8:00 AM
 
The worst part is sometimes the programming idiots sabotage the programming language designers, releasing languages of their own.
# posted by OpenID mernen : 10:57 AM
 
The worst part is sometimes the programming idiots sabotage the programming language designers, releasing languages of their own.

Hey! I buried that project, don't bring it up!!!
# posted by Blogger Reginald Braithwaite : 10:59 AM
 




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