un|we|sen

I’m very much interested in the design decisions that go into making programming languages. As a result, I find myself in a lot of discussions about the pros and cons of different programming languages, and those conversations usually go beyond the “use X, you don’t need anything else!” that we all know and loathe from the intarwebs.

Personally, I have a strong background in Python and C++, so know at least one scripting language to the depth that I’ve read and fiddled with it’s implementation (CPython), and one compiled language to the depth that — despite that fact that it has a huge amount of features — few things surprise me there. I’m not a language lawyer, nor do I intend to become one though.

I suppose one of the reasons that I know those two languages pretty well is that I like a lot about them. I don’t really want to go into what specifically I like about them, but a consequence of knowing them so well is that I don’t always appreciate how complex they are. To me, there are just bits I know, bits I know a little less, and when I discover the occasional bit I don’t know, man am I chuffed to have learned something new!

Because those languages fit so comfortably in my mind, I’m usually fairly surprised — to the point of feeling ever so slightly offended — when people intensely dislike them. It’d be nice in a way if those people were idiots; unfortunately, most of them happen to be people I greatly respect. I needed to understand why this happens. Why is it that someone with that much experience, skill and knowledge holds such an utterly different opinion from my own? There is that nagging feeling that maybe they’re right, and I’m wrong. Inconceivable!¹

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1. I know what the word means, but I use it differently anyway. [↩]