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<title>Programming languages</title>
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<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>
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