Finished languages

Why can’t they leave well enough alone. The C++ people won’t be happy until they’ve turned C in to java and python and erlang and lisp.

I don’t get it, sometimes languages actually get finished. And sometimes people feel the need to make things “better” (in the progress sense) rather than make something new.

C itself was finished. Things like binutils are finished. Nobody feels the need to change ls all the time.
Why is it that some things can be left alone and some have to be ego-ed to death?

A friend of mine told me this story about how he was interviewing somebody for a C++ job and they didn’t know what a pointer was.

He thought this outlandish, but to me it makes sense. They have added so much crap to C++ that they’re trying to turn it into a new language.

If you read the internoise, you’ll see people say native C arrays are bad in C++. It took me a long time to figure out what they meant by that.

There’s nothing actually wrong withe native C arrays, they’re just ‘dangerous’ for people who only know how to use the ‘new’ C++ where you don’t have to know what pointers are.

Why is this a problem? You could say “Well, smarty pants, just don’t use the new features you don’t like.” And I’m all for that, that’s exactly what I do. I use the good early parts and leave the line noise alone.

But alas, maybe I work with other people who suffer from that ancient programmer’s ailment have having to play with all the cool new toys as soon as they’re discovered and you find yourself working on line noise.

So what languages have been finished.

Well, assembly language changes as they add features to processors. I suppose there’s no getting around that.

Fortran I think is done.

Cobol is done.

C is done.

Bash is done.

C++ can’t be left alone.

PHP can’t be left alone, there’s some great rants about that.

And python seems to also be in update hell, so there’s python and python3 binaries…

What else…

One Response to “Finished languages”

  1. yoni says:

    I guess Pascal is pretty done too.

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