Programming Languages as Essays

Inductor@feddit.de to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 564 points –
57

haskell: "you submitted your math work instead of an essay"

javascript: "this is awful, but at least i can read it anywhere i like"

lisp: "it is not grammatically correct to nest brackets so much"

lua: "your vocabulary is too limited and you have the writing skills of a child"

rust: "omg. your essay is fast, safe, and perfect in every way! A+"

css: "this is beautiful, but it doesnt say anything"

C#: did you just copy Java's essay and put your name on it?

COBOL: why it looks like it's from 16th century?

PHP: I did not ask for a spaghetti recipe

alternative Rust: it's great, but I asked for an essay, not "🔥 Blazingly fast rust-based EssayOS"

C# is Java in good

C# is Java except from Microsoft, which means it's designed and much more integrated with Windows. The official .net core even brings telemetry right out of the box. Using C# apps on Linux is a pain, which is very bad considering it's supposed to be like Java - compile once, run anywhere - except Java actually achieves it.

Also, Minecraft runs on Java. Therefore, C# is useless. Boom, destroyed /s

Untiy games are programmed in C#

So point for Java

True. F Unity, I prefer C/C++ with eg. Raylib. (Fr tho, I hate not having direct control over my whole code.)

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Rust v3: "It's three hours and I'm still compiling dependencies"

EDIT: Also, "What does Option[Arc[Mutex[BTreeMap[String, Box[RefCell[Box[amp mut F>>>>>>> where F : Fn(T) -> U in your essay mean?" (srry, I didn't come up with a better obscure data type, it's probably gibberish)

EDIT2: Lemmy deletes 'less than' sign for some damn reason (time to build Lemmy at home?)

My friend partially explained how the build safety system worked for Rust and my first reaction was "holy shit the link stage must take a century".

"Yes."

I don't think you should criticize a language that you clearly have not even learnt the syntax of. Dependencies are also a one-time compile and linking just your own program or library does not take very long, and if you've ever worked with C languages it's all the same.

Just because you don't know how to read a languages syntax doesn't mean it's bad, it's just like how you have to learn anything else. Rust is quite self-explanatory afterwards.

I do write Rust projects

EDIT: Well, it depends. If you statically compile everything with C build systems, in that sense, the speed should not differ from generic cargo workload. Although, in most cases, projects written in C are dynamically linked due to several reasons, one of which is code speed. In practice, even huge projects written in C (30k to 10k LOC) build quicker than C++ or Rust.

I'm not pooping on generics, either. Generics is a saviour for correctness and performance. Yet, I want to point out the type creep is still a thing, even though there's little we can do about it.

Anyways, this thread should be better interpreted with humor, instead of technical accuracy.

Fair, I just don't like it even when it's humorous as it still speaks of a language in a bad way.

Also, if you use a Unix system to build your projects I can recommend you check out Mold if you haven't yet as it speeds up the linking significantly.

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Found the Rust programmer

Ha, such a loser. Real programmers use C.ԥ[��\�q��r��8-߿�ʱT�xd]�UG���S;���v�o������ՠ��N�iYts~fv���@ֿ��Qj�\�Q��_"�$�:� �����0��y��G�6�K!~{Ȯ������Z�n�˭s�\��ڣ�:J��1���e�k=�${�Z�3�k~67D�����K���(�P.��v�0��a�����d���6e?=�v�)���a��bF���R��4>�˕�G�=��v-�dP��O�3��+A�nw�|ъ�f۽b�oF�I`'�#��:��̴g>�j:^���O�mu^U�l�A�oI�'�.��j>Dm\����y��2T��8w�D"1������ת«Q����l�"�C�{��������% �_�A�߸�=t��� �X��m�9R�x��)�a�-���tbL�����Ǣs��d$oMZ��4I1jXD���
Segmentation fault

what! how did you know??!?

Rust may be good and all, but I doubt it's magically always write good A+ code, I'm sure some developers will slap all their code inside unsafe as a shortcut.

yeah i was mostly joking. rust will never catch up to javascripts beauty

Hey! Don't read my code!

(how else are you supposed to cast a lambda to a generic type parameter?)

rust: "You just translated someone else's essay"

javascript: "this is awful, but at least i can read it anywhere i like"

There are only 3 engines capable of interpreting most of it.

it can run on almost any browser, it can be bundled to run on desktop or mobile. i know wasm exists but javascript is still sadly an extremely versatile language, mostly due to its support on the web

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Brainfuck: it's technically an essay, but who in their right mind would write it using only the first eight letters of the alphabet?

Perl: this essay is just one long run on sentence.

He just kept talking in one long incredibly unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic so that no one had a chance to interrupt, it was really quite hypnotic.

With some very odd random punctuation. (I love Perl, but some of the built-in variables . . .)

C++: The project is now led by university research comitee optimizing essays/second and consists 1k lines of template hieroglyphs.

Unpopular opinion: Ruby is too widely used, because it's the least performant language.

Sometimes even for stuff, where performance matters (Asciidoctor).

Ruby's popularity in the early 10s thanks to Ruby on Rails feels like it happened by accident. The language is hard to read and low performance, but Rails is completely automagic. But this is also the worst thing about rails. You create your app fast, but then maintaining it is expensive because you can't onboard new developers easily. Even if they're familiar with rails' automagicisms, it will take them quite some time to parse what the hell the code is doing.

Meanwhile I seem to recall Ruby's creator finding the situation of his language being popular because he'd created it as an experiment and never thought it would be used in production grade environments

"ruby is hard to read" is a really strange take...

Yeah there’s multiple people in here saying that and it seems like maybe they’ve never actually written Ruby. I don’t think Ruby is a good language for writing business apps in, but it’s incredibly easy to read. Way easier than pretty much every single language out there.

Now if you start including shit like rails, sure. But that’s not Ruby. That a framework and just like Spring or Django or Boost or whatever, it has its own semantics and can be incredibly difficult to read. That has nothing to do with the language though.

language is hard to read

for item in array do
  puts item[:name]
end

Whew, iterating and working with data in Ruby is so hard. How does anyone read this stuff.

low performance

Ruby is a syntax-sugar-loaded C-wrapper, just like Python and countless other languages that don't compile straight to machine code. If anything other than C and Rust are slow to you, then sure, maybe Ruby isn't a good fit for your project (but Crystal might be).

create your app fast

Damn right, I'm two or three times as productive as I ever was in C#/Razor, Java/Spring or kludging through the countless JS boilerplate-heavy web frameworks.

but then maintaining it is expensive

As with any app that grows into something successful and widely used, technical complexity becomes exponential. I've found once web applications grow to a certain number of models and controllers, the relationships between them start to grow exponentially as well. This means one small change can ripple throughout your application and have unintended consequences where you least expect.

This is not even remotely a unique problem to Ruby. It's happened across every project I've seen that grows beyond 30 models and a couple of dozen controllers, regardless of language. This is why unit testing is so important.

But, specifically you mentioned you can't "onboard new developers easily". I don't see how. I've taken two CS grads straight out of college and had them adding features with tests within a couple of days on Ruby projects. Ruby was designed to be most friendly to humans, not the compiler. If Rails is what is tripping you up, imagine trying to learn a new web framework on top of an even more complicated language than Ruby. I just don't see this argument at all, from my experiences.

Ruby’s creator finding the situation of his language being popular because he’d created it as an experiment

Pretty sure most any language that was created by an individual and not by BigCorp™ is a feat in and of itself. This speaks more widely to a language's capabilities and value if it can reach popularity without corporate backing. This argument seems to imply that because of it's origin, it will always be some kind of experimental toy that was never intended for wide-use.

Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds:

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Things have to start somewhere, I guess?

I kindly ask you to be more constructive in your criticism of Ruby. It's a great, powerful language with a low barrier to entry. There's no reason to spread FUD about it.

for item in array do
  puts item[:name]
end

What's with the weird syntax, isn't idiomatic ruby

array.each do |item|
  puts item[:name]
end

(or the shorthand version)?

Was about to say as someone who's been using Ruby for over a decade, 8 of which professionally, I've never once come across a for loop. each on the other hand, all day every day.

First time I’ve ever heard someone call a for loop “weird“. They’ve been around for 50 years 😂

The whole point was on readability, not trying to make rubocop be quiet. Sure, .each is great, but I’m not sure about it being shorthand. What did you save? Like 3 characters? I find the for loop more readable unless I’m method chaining.

Not in ruby, the for loop was initially put there to make it friendly for people from other languages and is discouraged. It's just syntax sugar on top of each.

By shortand version I meant

array.each(&:to_s)

(although in this case I'm not calling puts anymore)

edit: lemmy keeps putting the & there, but you know what I mean

Not in Ruby

It’s valid syntax, it’s part of Ruby. It’s easy to read and familiar across many languages. Write what you want to write, I’m not sure why you feel the need to finger wag.

It's as performant as python which is way more widely used.

No, there circulated a performance list a while ago. Python was in the lower third while Ruby was bottom.

Which benchmark are you talking about? The most common I know of is the computer language benchmarks game, here's a nice implementation of it.. You can see ruby is actually a decent bit faster.

It's an annoyingly persistent myth that ruby is significantly slower than python.

Yeah I usually run my backend in Asciidoc too. The level of its performance might surprise you.

If you're struggling to read Ruby, you probably aren't going to read any of the other languages on this list. That's the real humor! 😂

TS: "You can't just say 'any' and end the essay expecting I know what the fuck your talking about

JavaScript: i know it was easy to write it like this but you should index your citations next time

Typescript: I meant properly, not on your scratch sheet