Consider the following equation:

   syntactic sugar + libraries = programming language
Now, the "library" aspect of a programming language is not really
inherent to the language itself. There's no intrinsic reason why perl
is good at regular expressions, whereas Visual Basic is not - it's
just that the people who wrote perl decided to include regular
expressions, whilst Microsoft did not. What we find, therefore, is
that language writers implement the same functionality over and over
again. Perl might have some useful library that python does not, and
vice versa. The chances are, though, that if you want to use some of
that functionality, you have to port over code - which is a waste of
time.

On the "syntactic sugar" front, some languages are definitely better
than others. I like python because it has lists built into the syntax.
So I can write something like:

 a = [1,2,3]
which I cannot do in C. I also like python's exception handling - it
is much better than Visual Basic. C does not have exception handling.
So I would rather write in python than C, because I can be more
productive.

This then leads to the argument: why have a programming language with
a fixed syntax at all? If you came up with a language whose syntax was
extensible, then you would have what I believe would be the world's
best programming language - let's call it PPL. PPL would consist of a
bunch of libraries of two types: "function libraries" (which are the
libraries that I have referred to in my definition of a programming
language above), plus "syntax libraries" (an entirely new concept).
These syntax libraries would be capable of converting an infix program
to a stack-based program (e.g. Forth). The stack-based program would
be specifically designed to be simple to compile.

So I could then imagine the scenario where someone woke up one day and
said: "hey, wouldn't it be grand if PPL supported
object-orientation?". The programmer would then write a syntax library
that implemented it, and distribute it like a normal library. Anyone
interested in object-orientation could then import the library and
hey-presto - instant object-orientation. It would also be possible to
translate just about any language to any other language, because I
would expect that its syntax could be encapsulated into a so-called
syntax library.

Thoughts and comments welcome!

--
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk

    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/

I quote from
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
the following text:

If you look at these languages in order, Java, Perl, Python, you
notice an interesting pattern. At least, you notice this pattern if
you are a Lisp hacker. Each one is progressively more like Lisp.
Python copies even features that many Lisp hackers consider to be
mistakes. You could translate simple Lisp programs into Python line
for line. It's 2002, and programming languages have almost caught up
with 1958.

Starling

Starling
Who uses Lisp a lot, but doesn't have to like it.  :)

This is a mistake made by each of Lisp, Smalltalk and Forth, getting a
syntactically extensible language at the expense of readability.

For example, in Gwydion Dylan (http://www.gwydiondylan.org), just about
*all* of what progrmamers would regard as the normal built in
Pascal-like syntax of the language is actually implemented as macros in
the standard library.

Unfortunately that library doesn't integrate the built-in primitive
types into the obejct system all that well (it can't, really), which is
why Dylan integrates a very similar object system into the base language.

-- Bruce

Regards,
Joachim
--
Currently looking for a new job.

Presumably "perfect" means "as good as it is possible to be" but...
does good mean fast, reliable, bug-free on first compile/run?
does bad mean memory-hungry, buggy, inefficient?

One reason that there are so many languages is because "good" for a
numerical implementation of a 10,000 parameter model is not the same as
"good" for string-parsing.

I can imagine that the perfect string-parsing or modelling or AI or ...
language might exist.  I cannot see anyway in which there could be A
perfect language.

--

      Department of Biology, University of York, York, YO10 5YW

Granted, I've never actually used .NET, so I can't vouch for how accurate
the above statements are. I'm simply repeating information that I've gleaned
from magazine articles and other forms of Microsoft marketing.

BTW you forgot maintainability, and that's a central issue for >90% of
all software written on this planet. Perfection for some specialized
area like AI or parsing fades before this goal.
AND it's an area where open research questions are plentiful.

Regards,
Joachim
--
Currently looking for a new job.

You need some sort of parser for every tool that needs to understand
the code at all.  Lisp's is easy: `r' `e' `a' `d'.

Unfortunately in other languages, there's a vicious circle where the
lack of trivial parsing has led to the mindset that tools are
extra/add-on/outside the realm of the language, which in turn devalues
trivial parsing.

For myself, the ease I have found in building tools to work on code
weighs very heavily, and the alleged difficulty of reading Lisp weighs
not at all.

--
Tom Breton at panix.com, username tehom.  http://www.panix.com/~tehom

Regards,
Joachim
--
Currently looking for a new job.

--

      Department of Biology, University of York, York, YO10 5YW

Strangely enough, this all is not a problem with Smalltalk. Smalltalks
don't use (or need) macros.
Of course, some design patterns are left unformalized in Smalltalk (such
as MI), and any tree walker will not see that. It doesn't seem to be a
large problem in practice :-)

Regards,
Joachim
--
Currently looking for a new job.