Re: [LUG] Language wars was Re: Global variables in Python?

> I've long had a theory that the world only needs 5 programming languages.

The world may be more complex that you think.

I don't doubt that :)

> 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_? ;)

No! Actually, what I mean, in my Ivory Tower, is "Something like PHP but not PHP" but that doesn't exist yet. However, I felt it would undermine my point if I mentioned that as it would mean adding a whole new language to the existing sea...

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..."

Wise words. Plus, as geeks, it's an interesting exercise. "Can I do this?" - it only becomes a problem when they release it "Look what I did, isn't it neat?" and someone else takes it up because it makes them different to other coders "I can code in Banana, can you?" and it snowballs. Time is wasted learning something new, building the same tools that already exist for the other languages, and then limits start imposing themselves and it's eventually forgotten.

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.

Certainly, once you know one or two languages, it gets a lot easier to learn others, especially high level. It's a very long time since I did any low level, and I tend to leave compiler writers alone in darkened rooms, they seem to like it that way.

But task-specific - how strictly is that used in the real world? Coders use what they know and force it to fit a scenario (I certainly do!)

And also the lines are blurring. Middleware, mishmash and combinations of different technologies all smooshed together (Ajax). It seems to be getting harder to be task specific when the tasks involved in a particular project are getting more diverse.