the ivory tower

[miriam_e]

I've become disappointed with the increasing fascination for making languages less user-friendly with strict type-casting and very steep learning curves. More than 20 years have passed since we were promised fifth-generation languages that would ease the task of programming by having the computer understand the way we think about problems. Instead "experts" openly sneer at easy-to-use languages, and becoming a programmer is now, more than ever, a matter of lengthy training for a closed and obscure priesthood.

[sigh]

Comments

[guyminuslife.livejournal.com]

Well, it's like....the programmers spend all this time mastering a different language, figuring out how to tweak this-and-that so that they shave .000001 seconds off run-time, et cetera, et cetera, and so they'd feel a bit miffed if a layman could do it without wasting years studying computer science.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Heheheheh :)

I appreciate your irony, but in the early days of personal computer programming when I first got into it I spent a lot of time tweaking my assembly programs to shave microseconds off and developed a lot of lovely tricks. However microseconds mean nothing anymore.

These days programming is quite different. Object oriented programming was introduced under the guise of making programs more maintainable, but this was done in a way that forced everybody to write in very inefficient ways. So now programs run more slowly than ever before. It is only that the hardware runs faster than ever before that hides it.

And strict data-typed languages have gained wide acceptance on the (I believe, faulty) assumption that forcing programmers to make more errors if they don't learn to think like machines saves programmers from making other errors. It almost makes sense in a weird Alice in Wonderland kind of way. But out here in the real world you just want to do the job without spending ages battling against the artificial constraints of the language, and without spending months learning yet another monstrous language.

I think that is why html was such a great success. It is very easy to learn, without a steep learning curve. (Just learn a couple of tags and you are already writing web pages... learn a few more tags and your pages look prettier... etc.) If you write something wrong then the browser doesn't crash or come to a halt -- it gracefully skips over the unrecognised tag. The scripting language for webpages, javascript, is typeless and very simple to use.

But I've heard so many "experts" heap shit on html... and now with the advent of xml, which is far more strict, they satisfy their sadistic desires to force the author to think more like a machine once again. And "experts" hate javascript -- it is waaaay too easy to use.

I think you are right though. They are almost certainly not conscious of it, but I do think they feel threatened by languages that anybody could use.

They may also be like those people who take pride in the fact that nobody can understand what they are talking about. They use complicated words and phrases where simpler ones would work better, and use acronyms where the full names would be more appropriate. Perhaps it is also similar to the film critics who sneer at popular films like the wildly successful Something About Mary, yet praise obscurantist "art" films.

[guyminuslife.livejournal.com]

Verily, I must agnothetisize, the retro-postmodernist intangibilintonation pertainable in the joabberwockiacal Albanian documentary "Je Schtrecha Myet" far ballastified that of the FACR-OFTY zingtast ballowing the annalitongs in "There's Something About Mary." GROFTY, you know?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

ROTFL
hehehehehe!
Excellent!

You see? This is what I spoke of earlier. How can you possibly ever belittle yourself? I give a boring monologue on something and you cut thru it beautifully with delicious humor.

[guyminuslife.livejournal.com]

I would not consider your monologue boring at all. Quite the opposite. So we both underestimate ourselves.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

:)
Touché