[clug] Bad features of programming languages.

[Hugh Fisher]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2023 at 23:56, Brenton Ross via linux
<linux at lists.samba.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am having an interesting conversation about bad features of
> programming languages.
>
> I am wondering if anyone from the group has some thoughts on what they
> hope never to see in a programming language, or just things you really
> dislike.

There are of course individual features I dislike about many
programming languages, but I always try to remember Bjarne
Stroustrup's reminder that the only programming languages people don't
complain about are the ones not being used.

What I hope never to see in a programming language, but am usually
disappointed, is people moving to a new programming language and
attempting to bring all the features of their previous language. My
current dislike is for type annotations being added to Python. Because
Java does, and therefore Python must too? Nobody could use Python to
build large successful projects before around 2015 when typing was
added?

So now we have very serious discussions about contra-variance vs
covariance in Python argument type checking (if you don't know what
that's about, my advice is not to learn: ignorance is bliss), and even
proposals to add an @overload decorator for Python functions/methods
so you can have more than one with the same name, distinguished by
argument types. (I'm waiting for the follow up discussion about how to
add consistent name mangling for overloaded functions and methods so
people doing dynamic linking don't run into the problems that eg C++
has.)

-- 

        cheers,
        Hugh Fisher