Oh, those programming nazis…
I’ve run by accident into The “Anti-For” Campaign, which includes a link to the Anti-If Campaign.
Morons.
First of all, only a maniac and a delusional can believe that the syntax of Haskell or that of Erlang are “simple and easy to understand”. This kind of people are only propagating unnatural programming languages. It’s like saying that the Chinese and the Japanese are simpler than English and French, just because their paradigm is different and they’re less verbose, and that we should all stop using English and French and start learning Chinese and Japanese.
To understand what is that these programming nazis are actually wanting, you should probably want to read Life after Loops and Eliminazione dei for in c# 3.5.
FACT: They don’t replace the functionality of if, for, and foreach. They only replace the way this is written on the screen!
No matter they’re shorter to write and easier to read, “IEnumerator”, “me.Each” and “items.Where” are still looping internally! The program does exactly the same thing, possibly even with an unnecessary overhead!
So what are those programming nazis trying to do with their “If and For cleansing”? Elegance for the sake of the briefness?
Or maybe they’re trying to benefit from their super-geniality and exclusively make use of constructs only available in certain programming languages, and of classes, objects, or concepts only available in some frameworks. Not to mention the weird and twisted syntax of some languages invented by alienated people…
My language is better than yours, because I can do everything without using the words “if” and “for”.
I am smarter than you, because you are still using the words “if” and “for” in your code.
Those elitists are actually the ultimate morons.
It’s because of this kind of individuals that everything is getting more and more complex and changing all the time, because “the classical way of doing things wasn’t good enough”.
I have some news for them: they’ll be dying the same way all of us mortals are dying. The classical way.
Jun 30, 2009 at 08:30
I'm reminded of how John "Mad Dog" Hall once wrote in an article in Linux Journal about how it's important to have at least a passing familiarity with assembly language since that's how all computers (so far) work in the end.
We're just passing bytes and everything else is decoration, ignorance of the 'classical' way will simply bite you in the end when your 'simple and easy to understand' constructs break down (like when you actually need to get some work done instead of filtering primes for the nth time…)
Trivial iterations aside the constructs they espouse tend to become anything but simple and easy when iterations become nested and more complex. At such times I'm reminded of the usefulness of Common Lisp's LOOP-macro which pretty much had its own (powerful) pseudo-language for all kinds of looping. The nearest equivalent (though less powerful) in modern languages seems to be Python's list comprehensions (for strikes again!) and certainly not for-less constructs.
Then again some Lisper's apparently protested LOOP as non-lispy, suggesting the use of, what else, functional constructs (map, filter, reduce, etc.)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
(and the last part was hilarious :-D)