Re: Someone loves PHP...

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 11/27/2015 04:01 AM, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
> 
> 1) A language must be predictable.
> 2) A language must be consistent.
> 3) A language must be concise.

I don't completely agree. A language must be readable and easy to understand.
Conciseness is desirable when it doesn't detract from or enhances those
properties, but often it is the opposite.

Use clauses are an example of this. They promote conciseness, and when writing
such code it seems quite easy to read and understand. But decades of experience
have shown that such code is often more difficult to read and understand when I
come back to it a few months later than if I had not used use clauses. As a
result, I have become mostly use-averse, and have strict guidelines on when to
use them.

> 4) A language must be reliable.
> 5) A language must be debuggable.

Again, I don't really agree. A language must minimize opportunities to make
errors. Debugging in most languages consists of finding things that don't
manifest until run time, and then as incorrect behavior, most of which would be
caught by the compiler for a well designed language, and most of the rest would
be caught by run-time checks for things not practical to detect at compile time.
What remains are usually logic errors, and traditional debugging is not very
helpful for those, unless you think of it as debugging your own thought processes.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"My legs are gray, my ears are gnarled, my eyes are old and bent."
Monty Python's Life of Brian
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