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The Weird and The Wonderful forum is a place to post Coding Horrors, Worst Practices, and the occasional flash of brilliance.

We all come across code that simply boggles the mind. Lazy kludges, embarrassing mistakes, horrid workarounds and developers just not quite getting it. And then somedays we come across - or write - the truly sublime.

Post your Best, your worst, and your most interesting. But please - no programming questions . This forum is purely for amusement and discussions on code snippets. All actual programming questions will be removed.

 
AnswerRe: What's the Most Concise, Human-Understandable Practical Language? Pin
Member 1330167917-May-20 20:47
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GeneralRe: What's the Most Concise, Human-Understandable Practical Language? Pin
Rob Grainger21-May-20 23:11
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Member 1456470917-May-20 20:49
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Leo5617-May-20 21:36
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Steve Naidamast18-May-20 2:50
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Jalapeno Bob22-May-20 9:22
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johnywhy23-Oct-21 3:57
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Fred283417-May-20 20:51
Fred283417-May-20 20:51 
Hello,

The question must be looked at from several perspectives.
I would start by saying that if you give me 3 sliders to grade "practical", "concise" and "human readable", there is no way you will reach 100% on each, I would argue that not even an 80-80-80 is possible.

Everything is a trade-off, and you will sacrifice in one area because there are things you definitely want to keep in another, and those things have a cost. It is up to you to decide which area you want to favor. Or rather, which language you want to support based on your style as a programmer.

Then comes the question of the language's purpose. One should not compare a system language vs a scripting language for example. By nature, they have different purposes, have been build to solve different issues. One is compiled, the other is interpreted, and like it or not this has an impact on its design.

Each area you suggest deserve its own debate, almost.

"Human readable" for example. In your example, I would not want a very long hash table to be described without any special character. In the real world, large XML or JSON files are a reality. Imagine those without anything to identify what goes where. Tab separated ? or indentation dependent ? I personally think Python is an abomination for that reason alone, but there I am going against the majority, so let's avoid waking up the beast Smile | :)

But you see, right here, by giving more focus to "human readable", you have already lost in practicality. Trade-off as I said.

"Practical" : you mentioned "it has community, tools, …" => well those things are not the language itself, and they do not make it practical. The language itself should be self sufficient, you want to compare apples with apples. The fact that a language has a huge community is just showing its popularity, not its intrinsic worth.

If I look at my own experience in scripting languages, I have done many, and I firmly believe that the best of them is Lua, but the world favors Python. So which is more practical ? Probably Python if you look at the community and tools, but I think it is Lua for the human-readable part.

As for conciseness, I think it is not really the biggest problem. At some point, you have to tell the computer what to do. The real question is how much you want to work to get there. The real question is : "how much work should be accomplished by the programmer and by the compiler ?"

If it is hard to write, it is probably easy to parse (think C++).
If it is easy to write, it is probably hard to parse (think any high-level language).

I am still dreaming of a language that is as powerful as C++ but as easy to write as Lua.
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johnywhy8-Dec-22 20:29
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kalberts17-May-20 22:48
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