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diff --git a/lang.html b/lang.html deleted file mode 100644 index b7feb36..0000000 --- a/lang.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,224 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html> -<html lang="en"> -<head> - <meta charset="UTF-8" /> - <title>Programming languages</title> - <link rel="stylesheet" href="./style.css" /> - <link rel="icon" href="./favicon.ico" sizes="any" /> - <!--link rel="icon" href="./icon.svg" type="image/svg+xml" / --> - <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" /> - <meta name="theme-color" content="#241504" /> - <meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"> -<style> -span.pros { - font-weight: bold; -} -span.cons { - font-weight: bold; -} -</style> -</head> -<body> -<header> - <h1>Programming languages</h1> -</header> - -<article> - <p> - I've recently read Drew DeVault's blog post, <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2019/09/08/Enough-to-decide.html">How I decide between many programming languages</a>. I figured that I should write my own. - </p> - - <h2>C</h2> - <p><span class="pros">Pros:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2017/01/30/Lessons-to-learn-from-C.html">Simple</a>. - </li> - <li> - Interoperable with almost all other languages. - </li> - <li> - Direct access to system calls (well, for most system calls that I'd use, anyways). - </li> - <li> - Good ecosystem, and most packages I'd use are in my system's repositories. Using the system package manager is the only way to sanely manage dynamically linked libraries. - </li> - <li> - Flexible macro system. Yes, there are pitfalls, but it's flexible enough for my needs and it's not that hard to remember to add parenthesis. - </li> - </ul> - <p><span class="cons">Cons:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Null terminated strings are objectively bad - </li> - <li> - Footguns do exist, and there isn't anything like borrow checking or automatic reference counting. These aren't strictly necessary, but are obviously helpful. - </li> - <li> - <code>errno</code> is bad. (My opinion holds that the proper alternative is multiple return values, though I also believe that the langugage shouldn't make it easy to accidentally ignore errors, nor should error handling have too much boilerplate.) - </li> - </ul> - - - <h2>Go</h2> - <p><span class="pros">Pros:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Easy concurrency to write quick and relatively-scalable network services in. - </li> - <li> - Well-designed standard library, and a generally good ecosystem (with an non-insane language-specific package manager, which I find acceptable since Go libraries are statically linked). - </li> - <li> - The best <a href="https://go.dev/blog/ismmkeynote">garbage collector</a> I've seen in garbage-collected languages. - </li> - </ul> - <p><span class="cons">Cons:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - <a href="https://fasterthanli.me/articles/lies-we-tell-ourselves-to-keep-using-golang#all-or-nothing-so-let-s-do-nothing">The way zero values are handled are really bad</a>. - </li> - <li> - I'm not a fan of the automatic conversion between pointers and values. - </li> - <li> - <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2014/06/07/Why-Go-error-handling-doesnt-sit-right-with-me.html">Go's error handling doesn't sit right with me</a>. (I am <em>not</em> for exceptions, just to be clear.) - </li> - </ul> - - - <h2>Python</h2> - <p><span class="pros">Pros:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Code is easy to write. - </li> - <li> - Good-ish ecosystem. - </li> - </ul> - <p><span class="cons">Cons:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Code is hard to maintain. - </li> - <li> - Really slow. - </li> - <li> - The global interpreter lock guarantees that threading is a pain. <code>asyncio</code> also sucks, and there aren't many libraries written for <code>trio</code>. - </li> - <li> - Dynamically typed, and no, mypy doesn't magically solve everything. - </li> - </ul> - - - <h2>Shell scripts</h2> - <p><span class="pros">Pros:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Good for gluing my desktop together, automating day-to-day tasks (both on the desktop and administering servers), and generating Makefiles. - </li> - </ul> - <p><span class="cons">Cons:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - A lot of bad advice on the web, and many people write disgusting scripts. - </li> - <li> - Arrays are not available in standard POSIX shell, and life is a pain without them. - </li> - <li> - A sufficiently complex shell script that interacts with the network <em>is</em> going to have remote code execution vulnerabilities. - </li> - <li> - I wanted to say "dynamic typing" here. "No typing" is probably more appropriate. - </li> - </ul> - - - <h2>Common Lisp</h2> - <p><span class="pros">Pros:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Really flexible. Best for, well, list parsing. - </li> - </ul> - <p><span class="cons">Cons:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - <code>#'i-still-dont-get-the-point-of-having-two-namespaces</code>. - </li> - <li> - Dynamic typing. - </li> - <li> - Quicklisp confuses me. - </li> - <li> - <code>))))))))))))))))))))))</code> - </li> - </ul> - - <h2>Lua</h2> - <p><span class="pros">Pros:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Probably the best general-purpose scripting language. - </li> - <li> - Easy to use as an extension language. - </li> - <li> - Lua tables are really versatile. - </li> - </ul> - <p><span class="cons">Cons:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - The lack of real threads is a huge pain. No, coroutines are not threads. (Though, no other scripting language has sane multithreading, so... fair enough.) - </li> - <li> - Generally lacking ecosystem. - </li> - <li> - 1-based indexing sucks. - </li> - <li> - I still prefer curly braces over <code>end</code>. - </li> - </ul> - - - <h2>JavaScript</h2> - <p><span class="pros">Pros:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - None. I wouldn't use it if there are saner alternatives in browsers, e.g. if WASM could access the DOM. - </li> - </ul> - <p><span class="cons">Cons:</span></p> - <ul> - <li> - Quirks surrounding automatic type conversion and equality testing. - </li> - <li> - I don't see any compelling reason for this language to exist outside web browsers, yet Node.JS exists. - </li> - <li> - NPM. - </li> - </ul> -</article> - -<footer> - <ul role="list"> - <li><a href="./">Home</a></li> - <li>Runxi Yu</li> - <li><a rel="license" href="./pubdom.html">Public Domain</a></li> - </ul> -</footer> -</body> -</html> |