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CurtainDog wrote: This misses the point... the differences in language are ideological not functional.
Ohh yes definitely, however syntactical sugar just steepens the learning curve for the beginner, and if they all do basically the same thing, why waste the time and resources on developing alternative languages(dialects) for the same thing. the structure of a loop will for 99.9% of all possibilities be of the nature:
(precondition)
if(Condition)
do(work)
loop
why devise alternate syntactical variants, the time spent teaching all the variants could be more wisely used teaching good recursive theory, or data structure management etc...
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I agree - languages can be looked at as skins in much the same way as themes/styles may be applied.
Gilad Bracha talks about this in some of the material on Newspeak[^] - currently this uses a Smalltalk-like syntax but he mentions changing to use braces as standard, and somewhere talks about the idea of making the language skinnable.
I seem to remember similar thoughts from Martin Fowler somewhere in his Domain Specific Language work.
There are other examples. Particular, a trend in programming language design to support Inner DSL's (Fowler's terminology), where a DSL may be embedded in an existing language. Newspeak, LISP, Smalltalk, and OMeta all having some aspects in this direction.
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Yeah, I first thought of this when dealing with a source control issue a while back. A colleague of mine and I were frustrated with the way source control packages merge the code. Ours lets you use any third party merge tool you want, and we lean towards Winmerge or P4Merge by Perforce. Both are free and both have their strengths, but issues still come up; namely that Visual Studio/Resharper will often reformat you code for you when add a closing brace to a block in C#. The way it moves the code around and sometimes spans it over several lines, there's no way a text editor can tell that the two blocks of text are 'functionally equivalent' in C#.
So we thought it would be cool if there were a merge tool that had knowledge of C#, and wouldn't display a reformatting as a difference, allowing the developer to concentrate on the real changes. From there we made the leap to say 'why can't the IDE just display a block of code one way for one developer, and another way for another developer, depending on user options?' Because they would compile to the same IL anyway. And maybe this idea could extend from styles out to languages.
Of course the parser and IDE will have to get really smart for this to work.
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While it looks rather silly on the surface to have so many different languages (and it certainly makes our jobs as developers more difficult), there was a reason for creating each and every one of them. It's the same reason that there are aisles of similar-looking tools at any hardware store: you use a different tool for a different need, and if the tool you need doesn't exist, you create it.
Sure, you could keep adding stuff to the frameworks of the general-purpose languages to cover every possible eventuality, but that adds complexity and slows down the language. There are also situations that the general-purpose languages are simply not suitable for (i.e., functional languages).
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...And the reason so often is a bad one. #1 reason for inventing a language: ego. Yes, I mean you, Larry.
The single language idea is theoretically attainable through the all-enveloping runtime. A language is, or should be, a minimal set of statements; a few conditionals, assignment, sub/function and of course expressions. The vast and seemingly random collection of built-ins found in some languages are so much more manageable sorted into a structure of runtime APIs. But geek egos being what they are we'll continue to see a stream of fad "languages" each with its enthusiastic herd of fanbois.
Emerald On Runways, anyone?
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: But sometimes using a nail gun to hang a picture frame will do more damage than good.
Good point.
John
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A skilled craftsman can make a house with only a few tools, and yes it is usually built better then someone using power tools.(I've built a few things in my time  )
However if your building a trailer house which needn't pass the test of time (the homeless people need a trailer NOW!) then you build it with power tools.
In this time of disposable... everything, there is becoming less need for hand drills (even though they make a smoother hole) and more need for drill presses (just put the hole here).
Operating systems - built by stable language.
Most short life cycle Software - MegaLanguage.
High End Long Life Software - built by some stable language.
Cell Phone apps. - MegaLanguage.
I would hate to be the one to rewrite all the molecular modeling software, however it could greatly benefit by an update into a functional language. But there are only a handful of people in the WORLD who do this type of programming, and they do it with hand tools, love, and a lot of coffee. So to them it is Art.
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Ideally, we should have fewer languages. Seriously, what is a difference between VB and C#? However, I can't imagine a single language that would be good for all programming scenarios: for instance a system language needs to be close to hardware (think C), but a web scripting language needs to be as far from hardware as possible (JavaScript).
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Lets say there is a such language, will you use other ones?
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If there was a perfect food, would you eat anything else?
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Grape Ice Cream is perfect for the first day. But after you eat it a few times you long for plain vanilla ice cream. 
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Ah, so you made it then! 
Yeah, it's definitely best fresh, and in small doses.
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continue your thoughts: f**k off standards! lets everyone will make things different. It's so cool if there were 100 browsers and it's so interesting to write html for everyone of them!
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Not sure how that follows from what i wrote...
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Kamarey wrote: Lets say there is a such language
One that is close to the hardware and far from it at the same time? 
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I would, but frankly speaking I don't think we'll be able to use it. Since its mere existence would prove that all principles of logic known to humans are unsustainable, which would cause World War X and total destruction of planet Earth. Heck, forget about us and Earth, whole universe would collapse killing all living forms (including Bob) in the process!
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Languages may fall into disuse, but they don't cease to exist. Things that were written in languages that are now "dead" are still around even though maybe no one can understand them.
Furthermore, a language exists once it has been defined, even if no one uses it and, in the case of programming languages, even if no compiler or interpreter exists for it.
While I agree that the use of fewer languages in active development projects is a good thing, I could not choose "We should work towards far fewer languages". So I voted for "It should stay as it is now"; whereby if a language is expressive and easy to use and is useful across a broad range of application domains, then it may supercede several other languages. (Language Darwinism )
Plus, I disagree with the "s" at the end of "toward". 
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I think the 's' should remain, but be followed by the word "having"...
We should work towards having far fewer languages.
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One word .. Legacy
The only thing unpredictable about me is just how predictable I'm going to be.
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Ideally there should be one language only, not meter if it's the programming one or other. What's bad if everyone understands everyone?
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Surely that's More Languages == More Problems
The only thing unpredictable about me is just how predictable I'm going to be.
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Perhaps it's More Languages => More Problems.
Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions.
There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
{o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! )
|)””’) http://pihole.org/
-”-”-
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That's backward; More Problems == More Languages
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Just because someone wrote something in the language I know doesn't mean I will understand it.
WarePhreak
Programmers are tools to convert caffiene to code.
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