“The Semicolon Wars” is an introduction to the programming languages, talking about the first languages and how now we have near 2500 languages. The article compares languages to humans, saying there is also a huge amount of languages humans speak around the world, and how, like on earth, having many of something is, in many cases, better. I agree to a certain extent, because we can see in our city, with this much humans, we’ve exceeded the acceptable city’s capacity to let humans live comfortably, with the huge quantities of garbage produced every day and traffic everywhere. I think some of that could also apply to programming languages, there could be a point in time with so many languages, we would waste a lot of time trying to make all those languages talk to each other. We would have an enormous compatibility problem.
As for the advantages, I think there are plenty, because we’ve not reached the point above mentioned, so every programmer now has a lot of choices and could pick one language for an specific use case and the programmer’s style and preference.
Every programming language has its syntax, rules and standards, but there are also general standards of coding, like camelCase or snake_case, these are important because code isn’t something a programmer makes and everyone forgets about it, code needs to be maintained and the standards help. As for the language specific syntax style, really there is no “better one” we, as programmers, pick the one we feel most comfortable with.
As the author mention, everyone will talk wonders about their preferred language as if it were their son. I kind of understand this, the way I see it is that if more people use my preferred language, there’ll be more resources for development and the language will grow and have lots of support. The language I already know will grow and I won’t have to do a lot of work learning another language if that other language becomes mainstream. That being said, I don’t think there’ll be the “perfect language” because there are different kinds of problems that could be solved more effortlessly with one language or another.
Brian Hayes. (2006). The Semicolon Wars. 2018, de American Scientists Sitio web: http://webcem01.cem.itesm.mx:8005/s201813/tc2006/semicolon_wars.pdf
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