Familiarity v readability

The topic of discussion at the office today (yes, it’s Sunday) is Languages, Verbosity, and Java by Dhanji R. Prasanna, which purports to extoll the clarity of Java compared to more expressive languages like Ruby, Python, and Scala. What it really says is: “Languages that are familiar are more readable.” Of course languages that are …

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Humility in programming languages

John Backus (pdf) distinguishes two parts of a programming language: “First, its framework which gives the overall rules of the system, and second, its changeable parts, whose existence is anticipated by the framework but whose particular behaviour is not specified by it.” The framework part is all the built-in language constructs. The changeable parts are …

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