Programming languages July 24, 2024 on Runxi Yu’s Website

I’ve recently read Drew DeVault’s blog post, How I decide between many programming languages. I figured that I should write my own.

C

Pros

• Simple.
• Interoperable with almost all other languages.
• Direct access to system calls (well, for most system calls that I’d use, anyways).
• 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.
• 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.

Cons

• Null terminated strings are objectively bad
• Footguns do exist, and there isn’t anything like borrow checking or automatic reference counting. These aren’t strictly necessary, but are obviously helpful.
• errno 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.)

Go

Pros

• Easy concurrency to write quick and relatively-scalable network services in.
• 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).
• The best garbage collector I’ve seen in garbage-collected languages.

Cons

• The way zero values are handled are really bad.
• I’m not a fan of the automatic conversion between pointers and values.
• Go’s error handling doesn’t sit right with me. (I am not for exceptions, just to be clear.)

Python

Pros

• Code is easy to write.
• Good-ish ecosystem.

Cons

• Code is hard to maintain.
• Really slow.
• The global interpreter lock guarantees that threading is a pain. asyncio also sucks, and there aren’t many libraries written for trio.
• Dynamically typed, and no, mypy doesn’t magically solve everything.

Shell scripts

Pros

• Good for gluing my desktop together, automating day-to-day tasks (both on the desktop and administering servers), and generating Makefiles.

Cons

• A lot of bad advice on the web, and many people write disgusting scripts.
• Arrays are not available in standard POSIX shell, and life is a pain without them.
• A sufficiently complex shell script that interacts with the network is going to have remote code execution vulnerabilities.
• I wanted to say “dynamic typing” here. “No typing” is probably more appropriate.

Common Lisp

Pros

• Really flexible. Best for, well, list parsing.

Cons

• #'i-still-dont-get-the-point-of-having-two-namespaces.
• Dynamic typing.
• Quicklisp confuses me.
• ))))))))))))))))))))))

Lua

Pros

• Probably the best general-purpose scripting language.
• Easy to use as an extension language.
• Lua tables are really versatile.

Cons

• 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.)
• Generally lacking ecosystem.
• 1-based indexing sucks.
• I still prefer curly braces over end.

JavaScript

Pros

• None. I wouldn’t use it if there are saner alternatives in browsers, e.g. if WASM could access the DOM.

Cons

• Quirks surrounding automatic type conversion and equality testing.
• I don’t see any compelling reason for this language to exist outside web browsers, yet Node.JS exists.
• NPM.