D language?

**pheres** · 08-12-2007

Originally Posted by prog-bman

Yah, who needs to progress. Let's just keep programming in the same languages!

New Programming languages with 3 or 4 nice new features doesn't got us anything so far. It doesn't solve the problems software development suffers from all the time, like, the demand for more complex software systems, lack of a software engineering method working for all types of software, ignoring education in software design/implementation in computer science, or a design method what is verifiable/executable. There is just no need for another programming language working in a similar way as the 3 zillion already existing. because the limiting faktors in software development today are the things mentioned above.

**whiteflags** · 08-12-2007

Hyperbole doesn't make an argument correct or sound smarter. We're not even talking about a particular language anymore so what is your real problem with practically everthing?

You could be expecting some sort of rigourous miracle language to come along that is quick to master and solves all your problems. You could have had a bad experience with a different paradigm. You could simply have no idea what you are taking about, too.

I can't make up my mind which, so pick one. They're all stupid.

**pheres** · 08-12-2007

I just said that D nor E nor F will be the progress what software development really needs. There do you see the stupidity/hyperbole exactly? I do not expect a miracle, nor did I've bad experiences (ok, I had them, but not worse than everyone else I guess). Maybe I (and all researchers actually looking for better software development methods) are stupid and don't know what they are talking about.
so you expect new programming languages to solve the actually problems not solved by all programming languages before. I do not. Thats a difference in opinions and should be normal in social life. no reason to bite round you

**whiteflags** · 08-12-2007

Originally Posted by pheres

so you expect new programming languages to solve the actually problems not solved by all programming languages before. I do not. Thats a difference in opinions and should be normal in social life. no reason to bite round you

No, that's what you stated I think. Are you that positive that there are no languages that execute in a matter-of-fact way, are capable of building complex systems, or make it easier to study software engineering that came into being after the 70s? Your statement that the "3 zillian" languages all fail massively in all of these areas is quite an exaggeration.

prog-bman was being sarcastic, in case you never noticed, btw. And now I'm just completely confused, because you took that seriously and said all new languages suck, and now want to convince me that new languages don't suck or old languages suck less, or something. And it doesn't even matter at this point.

**pheres** · 08-12-2007

you seem to get me intentionally wrong. Newer languages are better, no question. but they are not suited to handle the complexity of huge software projects. They get expensive, they overrun their time frame, they are buggy (to be exact they are buggy in a constant manner: after a while updates does not lower the absolute count of bugs), they are hard to maintain and they fail.
my statement was: a new language will not solve that problems.
now please criticize that statement and not some constructed things I never said.

**zacs7** · 08-12-2007

Originally Posted by pheres

you seem to get me intentionally wrong. Newer languages are better, no question. but they are not suited to handle the complexity of huge software projects.

Not that I care much, but where are you pulling these "facts" from? It also depends which software model your talking about (ie how the language is designed to be used, RAD, agile etc).

You never said anything about new languages not solving problems, you said they just suck. I suppose we better all go back to B then, or even before B - no point using C, after all it was a new language and therefore must suck.

**pheres** · 08-12-2007

Originally Posted by zacs7

Not that I care much, but where are you pulling these "facts" from? It also depends which software model your talking about (ie how the language is designed to be used, RAD, agile etc).

Turning on your tv should be enough. At least here in german we have 2 very actual examples: toll collect system and a new software to manage unemployment. both suffer from exact the problems I mentioned. If you say developers over here are just incapable, well what may be true, but others are just not better. if you are really interested in (which i doubt of) I can get you some references to scientific papers investigating the problems of software engineering today.
I'm actually pretty surprised to see my statements so heavily criticized. Until today I was convinced that these things are common sense.

Originally Posted by zacs7

You never said anything about new languages not solving problems, you said they just suck. I suppose we better all go back to B then, or even before B - no point using C, after all it was a new language and therefore must suck.

Where do I say they suck? Ok I try it one more time: Newer languages are nice, because the abstracting away things what in former languages had to be done by hand or introduce pretty new features like tmp and so on. But, they are just the wrong tool to solve the class of problems todays software projects suffer from in the first place. D may be a great language, but the main problems will stay the same. And thats why nearly nobody will switch, the costs of switching to D are just greater than the return (return in the sense of solving actual software engineering problems)

**Rashakil Fol** · 08-12-2007

Originally Posted by maxorator

I would never wish there would be another programming language made. As far as I know, all new languages are slow, ugly and obfuscated.

Originally Posted by maxorator

We have everything we need - Assembly for performance, C for saving time, C++ for complexity.

You are joking, right?

Right?

Right?

**laserlight** · 08-12-2007

And D for Donkey?

**cboard_member** · 08-12-2007

Eee-haaaw!
I am so listening to music right now.

**whiteflags** · 08-12-2007

Can I at least get you to admit that you stated this, pheres?

Originally Posted by pheres

[A new language] doesn't solve the problems software development suffers from all the time, like, the demand for more complex software systems, lack of a software engineering method working for all types of software, ignoring education in software design/implementation in computer science, or a design method what is verifiable/executable. There is just no need for another programming language working in a similar way as the 3 zillion already existing. because the limiting faktors in software development today are the things mentioned above.

And this is the reason why I find statements similar to yours - "Newer languages are better but don't get the job done" - very paradoxical. They do get the job done. It is merely that your evaluation of what makes a good language is entirely unfair. I doubt that in a near future a single programming paradigm, or a single language is going to solve all the problems that you mention. (And don't really attempt to pin down with some sort of evidence - I still think that you're relying on umbrella statements purposefully so that they can't be meaningfully applied to anything.) It's unreasonable to expect this kind of breakthrough out of one particular thing. That's why I said you have no idea what you're talking about.

At least here in german we have 2 very actual examples: toll collect system and a new software to manage unemployment. both suffer from exact the problems I mentioned.

Newer languages are nice, because the abstracting away things what in former languages had to be done by hand or introduce pretty new features like tmp and so on.But, they are just the wrong tool to solve the class of problems todays software projects suffer from in the first place.

Not being from Germany, I find it hard to understand the examples that you have provided, because I feel like even if I had visited there, I still wouldn't have the ability to make an evaluation of the software these systems use. However I don't think that a new language sucks just because it is applied wrongly to a class of problems.

Your computer is a complex system that runs many programs written in different languages to solve problems. It is how complex things should be designed. Why should any complex system depend on one umbrella language that will never exist? Why do you expect that kind of breakthrough out of research? It is already possible now to design complex systems using a class of, or several languages.

Do we understand each other now.

**pheres** · 08-12-2007

Ok i think I know why we are arguing: No, I do not expect to see any super programming language that solves software engineering problems. The power of programming languages is stagnating for years now, while demands/complexity of systems is increasing all the time. Instead of creating new languages we should think of new methods to reliable create software and in fact there are people who do that - without much success so far as it seems. today a spec is build from requirements and a programmer _somehow_ (Do you have universities that teach methods how exactly? I don't know not one over here) creates a design and hacks the code. If he is good he will get it done. unfortunately nobody knows if he is good enough until the end of the project. Even if he is good and the software works as it should with a low count of bugs the chances are good that the design spec has not much to do with the code anymore. The project is nearly unmanageable now. _That_ sucks, not the languages. But new language can't improve that situation. We need for example straight forward methods to create a design. We need a way to have designs that are verifiable and even indirect executable. And we need better education of software engineers, not the kind of people coming out of university today knowing how to draw 13 uml diagrams out of their head but have hard times to get a hello world app compiled.
So nothing against D or some else language you prefer. but they will not help us much looking at the big picture

**whiteflags** · 08-12-2007

I think I understand that you're measuring the effectiveness of a language based on how monolithic the code can become. I agree that there are some toy languages that simply reimplement features available in other places and don't make the code any less of a headache than before. These are the languages that also aren't being used for anything. But this doesn't mean that new languages aren't a part of a better future in software. After all, there are new languages that are useful.

Read on.

> But new language can't improve that situation. We need for example straight forward methods to create a design.

Yes they can. Languages don't require a great deal of applications like C or C++ have in order to be what they are. There is nothing wrong with implementing a whole new language to solve a new class of problems (as mathmatica does for equations and other math things, for instance). I hope you realize that a new language can be all that you need to get an expressive design. If you don't understand that, then perhaps you need to re-evaluate your definition of what a programming language is, or read SICP, or something.

**Rashakil Fol** · 08-12-2007

Originally Posted by pheres

No, I do not expect to see any super programming language that solves software engineering problems.

I'm reminded of an anecdote by one guy who started a software company, where a project manager at another company told him his company must have excellently fine-tuned project management, because they were keeping up with a schedule that was deliberately made too accelerated. The guy had trouble keeping a straight face, because his company had no project management at all! He was using ML at the time.

There's a language I'm a fan of, where I can write code, fix its syntax errors until it compiles, and it works. No bugs. Or they rarely/never appear. Really!

Of course, there are always some software engineering problems. But programming languages and programming language features can fix software engineering problems -- all languages do, and they do so in modest and less-than-modest fashions. Take strong typing, for example. That solves a software engineering problem. What about static typing? There's another. How about lexical scoping, or namespaces? Solves another one. Garbage collection? There's another one solved.* A serious module system (instead of #include barfage)? There goes another. The const keyword? There's another. Or better yet, pick a language where it would be redundant. Restrictions on naming that differentiate between values and types? There's more refinement to the namespacing problem. Isolation of side effects? Solves another one. I think that's coming to C# soon, in a primitive way. Type system-based descriptions of side effects? Ooooh. Statically typed software transactional memory? ~drool~.

* Edit: the biggest one of them all -- since named functions and variables were invented. Hey, I forgot to list the invention of subroutines!

**OnionKnight** · 08-12-2007

Language is not really the issue here, people can't design because they're never taught to, and that is not because there is no method of doing it. We call this abstraction, and it comes in many different flavors.
SICP is a great read, it teaches programming instead of a programming language. The programming courses I've taken in high school all took programming in the wrong direction. For example a whole week could be spent on explaining how to make something as painfully simple as a Fahrenheit to Celsius converter by taking lengths explaining things like how integer math can't produce fractions. This stuff was all low-level and spends no time on abstraction and understanding what's going on at the upper level and how it all translates into the components you just built.