My Language is Better than Yours

My language brings all the geeks to the yard,
And they’re like “It’s better than yours”
Damn right, it’s better than yours,
I can teach you, but I have to charge

Programming languages – the second favorite thing for geeks to fight about (right after code editors and IDE‘s).

Everybody knows Java sucks, that PHP is a script kiddie’s tool and that Lisp is the most magnificent thing ever to crawl out of the primordial ooze of academic language research.

Ask somebody else and suddenly everyone knows JavaScript is the best thing since sliced bread and Java is only used by weird people of the Indian persuasion … and Google. For some reason.

Does all of this really matter?

At the end of the day most languages are turing complete, which means you can use any language to do anything. Write your next killer app in brainfuck for all I care. You should do it in malbolge actually, that will make the whole geek community green with envy.

But you know what, your app doesn’t win based on the technology you use, users don’t care! What matters is solving an actual problem.

There’s still no excuse for any modern language to exist without type inference though …

Uncovering the Unknown: Principles of Type Inference – an awesome talk explaining exactly why there is no excuse for making people type int and char in 2012.

I’m looking at you Java.

John McCarthy, an American computer scientist. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)