MSDN Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 82)

could be considered unnecessarily complex for any given application, but it must cope Howard Dierking Why do programming The languages we use to with an essentially unbounded set of applilanguages connect with people on such a express our ideas become cations. Domain-specific languages can help deep level—such that communities of lanin specific cases, but now we have to deal guage zealots form? a part of ourselves so with the complexities of many languages Bjarne Stroustrup You should ask a psythat if you know only one and their interactions. chologist, a sociologist, or maybe even an economist, rather than a computer scienlanguage, proponents HD How should a general-purpose lantist! My guess is that the languages we use of other languages guage support application design ideas such to express our ideas become a part of ouras component programming and service selves so that if you know only one language, could appear personally programming? proponents of other languages could appear threatening. In that case, BS A general-purpose language should personally threatening. In that case, the sosupport the writing of libraries that express lution seems to be to know more languages the solution seems general and application-specific notions, well. I don’t think you can be a professional to be to know more support tool building, and provide the glue in the software field knowing only one proneeded to connect different parts of an apgramming language. There may also be an languages well. plication. For that, the language needs flexeconomic reason: while fundamental unibility, an expressive type system, good basic derstanding transcends programming language boundaries, many practical skills don’t. So if I know only performance, and long-term stability. language X and its tool sets, and you argue for language Y and its toolsets, you are threatening my livelihood. Again, the solution HD Is multiple dispatch a good thing? seems to be to know several languages and toolsets (and to be solid BS Yes. A conventional single-dispatch object-oriented programon fundamentals). Unfortunately, my suggested solutions do not ming language (such as Simula, C++, Smalltalk, Java, and C#) cannot take into account that most people have very little time left after elegantly express simple operations, such as multiplying numbers doing all that they feel necessary just to manage. That’s no excuse or finding the intersection of two shapes, where the exact types are not known until run time. The resulting code (relying on double for zealotry, though. dispatch, the visitor pattern, and so on) is slow and not as mainHD What should be the role of the IDE in software development? tainable as we’d like. Languages that support multiple dispatch at run time (like Dylan and CLOS) do better and languages (such as How should the IDE support a language? BS I’m not a heavy IDE user. I appreciate a responsive IDE editor C++) that support it at compile time can sometimes help a bit. Last with understanding of my language, but I also want to be able to year, together with some of my students, I published a research pawork without an IDE. I might have a different opinion if a good IDE was universally available—in reality a part of the language or vice versa (see Figure 1). My desire for portability of code plays a role here. With C++, I want to be able to understand my system from just the source code in the source files. I actively dislike IDE mechanisms that involve transformations or generation that cannot be represented as code fit for human consumption. HD Do you see noise or readability as a problem in today’s general purpose languages? If so, what is the solution? BS A simpler syntax would be nice, but I suspect that what most people grumble about when they talk about readability is not so much the actual text as the complexity of what is being expressed. Too many people expect to walk up to any program written in any language and—with only a bit of help from an online support facility—understand all the constructs used to express the program and all the logic of the program itself. Compare that to the way we look at natural languages and use them. Would you expect to understand a Shakespearean sonnet without background information? How about Beowulf in the original Old English? Maybe we expect too much from our programming languages. Any language that can express all that is needed for a wide range of application areas 82 msdnmagazine Bjarne Stroustrup Thoughts on Language Figure 1 The IDE Designer as a Language

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - April 2008

MSDN Magazine - April 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Foundations Test Run Service Station Windows with C++ Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - April 2008

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