Rant: Flame-War Fueling Language Reviews

One of my big pet peeves is people who start flame-wars over programming language choice. It is as if they think that they are righteous enough to force their one way of thinking about the narrow scope of tasks they solve, upon everyone else. Furthermore, it appears to me as if the majority of these arguments are fueled by the narrow-minded ignorance of those who do not take the time to actually understand the language that the proclaim to hate so much.

One example of this that sticks in my mind was a rant article I read in the early days of Java, which was written by a C++ aficionado. He spent a couple days learning Java and then proclaimed a long list of problems that Java had and why he would never use it. Although at the time his arguments seemed to make sense, I came back a year later to find that all his claims were actually based out of ignorance of Java, and that none of those problems actually existed if he took the time to learn how to think in Java instead of C++.

Now, one thing that seems obvious, but is frequently glazed over in language wars, is that not everyone is trying to perform the same tasks with the language they are using. This means that everyone requires something different out of the language they write in. Actually, now that I think about it, let me rephrase it: everyone requires something different out of the tools they write in, which would be the API. So just like you wouldn't use a hammer to plant your flowers or a rake to build a bookcase, different APIs are necessary to solve different problems.

Thus the way I see it, if you find a language that fits your personal style, you should be able to write anything in it, as long as there is a good API to support what you need to do. Thus a good API is the single most important place to discuss a lanuage, and only when it is in the context of accomplishing specific tasks.

So maybe what really is the problem is that people seem to have such strong opinions about a language when what they really should be discussing is the strengths and shortcomings of the API.

This would help keep away the all too often scene of petty complaints about the language itself, which are rooted in ignorance of how to leverage the language, and result in false arguments as to the righteousness of their own choice of programming language that are easily seen as flawed by those more knowledgeable of the other side.

But there is one other issue I'd like to discuss: if it is a matter of API only, why don't we implement Operating Systems in ruby, for example? Surely we could build a suitable base API for ruby and then build the rest of the OS in ruby itself?

Of course, the reason why we don't is that ruby is in a runtime environment that gives it the flexibility of platform independence and fast turn-around times, but lacks the speed necessary to accomplish such tasks efficiently.

But this isn't the fault of the language. No. This is the fault of the compiler/runtime. The langauge, which is just a grammar and rules for how to execute the basic constructs of said grammar, should be capable of performance at least on par with Objective-C, if not better.

Indeed, most languages, if they had a bunch of resources thrown at an optimized native machine language compiler, should achieve similar performance at runtime.

So when it comes down to it, when we review "languages", there are really three parts that need to be discussed, and each one needs to be discussed in the proper context:

1. API - Both the strengths and shortcomings.
2. Performance - As compared to other languages that can solve the same tasks.
3. Language - The kinds of people and projects that benefit and determent from the features of the langauge at hand.

So this brings me to one thing I have not discussed: The language itself:

Which languages you like is a matter of taste, and reflects upon you as a person. It naturally reflects on how you think and how you solve problems. But it also reflects on your ability to learn and adapt. Good programmers should always be learning and pushing their bounds, which always involves learning and understanding new languages. Unfortunately, too many people become comfortable in the one langauge they use and don't want to take the time to understand other languages. These same people, then, seem to always be the most vocal in the language flame-wars, usually displaying their ignorance to everyone in the process.

Expressing one's opinion is good, but people need to be more aware of what is their opinion versus what is fact; to be careful not to let their ignorance drive their zealous verbosity; and to support their viewpoint with calm and poise. Everyone is different and that is what makes life so rich and interesting. And while sharing ideas about what can make one language more useful than another is good, attempting to force everyone to conform to one way of thinking is not.