The end to all language wars and the great unity API to come!

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 12:24 PM, rantingrick <rantingrick at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why do you constantly propagate multiplicity? Why do you feel that we
> need 100 or so languages when about three would cover everything? Sure
> people are free to create whatever Frankenstein language they want in
> the confines of their hobby time, but we need standards and we need
> them NOW.
>

I specced up "the perfect language" a while ago. It gave you a clean
slate with no facilities but one: Define Operator. Then you define
whatever you want - let's say you start by defining = as assignment.
Give it a precedence and associativity, mark it as binary, and start
using it. Now, define + the same way, and -, and so on. Let's define
the letter 'd' as an operator - a binary or unary operator, such that
'2d6' means 'roll two six-sided dice, return the sum' (and unary 'd20'
is equivalent to binary '1d20').

What's wrong with this language? It doesn't do anything, and it does
everything. You could use the language for one thing and I use it for
another thing. There is NO connection. We may as well be using
different languages.

You could have three languages in the world, if one is assembly
language (for the one chip that everyone uses), one is this
clean-slate language, and one is C. Have we improved anything? No. It
won't be any easier to write an API for something; and it'll be a lot
harder to maintain code ("wait wha? This programmer's defined + and *
in opposite precedence to usual!"). But hey, there's only one language
that you need to learn!

Chris Angelico