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On 27/04/13 23:44, Simon Avery wrote: > > I've long had a theory that the world only needs 5 programming languages. The world may be more complex that you think. > PHP - why not? I find that funny as after a few oddities, PHP is pretty much top of my list of languages we didn't need and would have been better of without. Did you mean Javascript? ;) Probably most of us can agree there are too many programming languages, but people more skilled in the art than I decided they wanted a new one for good reasons each time they added their one. What was it Larry Wall said: "All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory..." There is of course a school of thought that what we need is more task specific languages. That every niche needs its own programming language shaped to the task. I suspect this group mostly consists of people who write compilers, and thus find the idea of learning a new programming language trivial as they understand how such languages are put together, and don't quite get the cognitive effort the rest of us have to expend to learn yet another language. And then there is a type<sic> of Forth programmer who knows in his soul that actually you can make Forth be that niche language with just a few words. On the other hand my mind is strangely drawn to the idea of languages that are expanded within themselves. But this risks within language fragmentation. Did I mention that the Perl I was working on last week has more than three different types of class system in use in the underlying modules, this can't be optimal either for performance or in terms of programmer productivity. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq