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title: Languages in one sentence
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Programming languages in a sentence
===

I spend far too much time talking about my opinions on programming
languages.  At least on this page, I will try to keep it short and
blunt.

Python is...
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...a hash table with a built-in scripting language.

Standard ML is...
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...innovative, classic, and obsolete.

Common Lisp is...
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...extremely powerful, to the extent that it is a local optimum, and
thus stale.

Haskell is...
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...very powerful, and with a clearly visible slope to even greater
heights.

C is...
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...a domain-specific language for composing system calls in the Unix
virtual machine.

C++ is...
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...an attempt at imposing control on C idioms, much like the attempt
to control dinosaurs in _Jurassic Park_, and occasionally with similar
consequences.

Shell script is...
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...a sublimely elegant masterpiece of data processing, rendered in
crayon.

COBOL was...
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...and that's bad enough.

Java is...
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...so weak that it is like a row of words that does not have any big
words, but it still has to be long to tell the thing that it wants to
tell, and so results in writing that is not pretty and is not elegant
but which is able to do the thing that the writer wanted it to do,
some of the time.

Awk is...
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...a wonderful, if complex, part of the Unix toolbox, although it
diverges in many quirky ways from others of the C famility.