For one, Latin has more fancy rules than French. I guess the subjunctive is probably something English speakers might consider fancy, but Latin has that too. Latin has more times that are conjugations of the core verb (rather than needing auxiliary verbs), has grammatical cases (like German, but two more if you include vocative) and, idk, also just feels fancier in general.
I’ll admit it’s been years since I actually read any Latin and that I only have a surface level understanding of all languages mentioned except for French, but this post reads like it’s about the stereotypes of the countries rather than being about the languages themselves.
I mean, French is vulgar Latin at best. And even if it wasn't obviously spoken by all sorts of French people, elites or not, it's also the official language of a bunch of other countries, from Monaco to Niger. "Elites and certain circles" is a very weird read, which I'm guessing is based on US stereotypes on the French? I don't even think the British would commit to associating the French with elitism.
Russian speakers being "mostly autoritarian left" is also... kind of a lot to assume? I'm not even getting into that one further. I don't know if the Esperanto one checks out, either. "Esperanto speaker" is the type of group, and this is true, whose wikipedia page doesn't include statistics but instead just a list of names. Which is hilarious, but maybe not a great Python analogue. It may still be the best pairing there, because to my knowledge English speakers aren't any worse at speaking English than the speakers of any other language. They are more monolingual, though.
It just all sounds extremely anglocentric to me, which is what it is, I suppose, but it really messes with the joke if you're joking about languages specifically. One could do better with this concept, I think.
Esperanto always struck me as more perl-like with each part of speech having its own suffix like perl has $ for scalars, @ for arrays, and % for hashes. Though perl is probably more like a bunch of pidgins...
Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.
PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.
Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.
Python is probably more like Spanish. Very easy basics, but then people from different regions of where it's has spread out barely understand each other
P.S: the closest thing to that is Egyptian, but not the language, the Alphabet (the Symbols, not a literal alphabet). Tons of alphabets are descended from Egyptian, including, but not limited to: Greek (and by Proxy Latin, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Armenian and Armenian (I just noticed this, I'm leaving it in because it's funny)), Arabic (and by proxy- I won't list all that), Hebrew, and Aramaic (and by proxy all Indian languages but one, as well as Tibetan, Phags-pa mongol (and by proxy exactly 5 letters of Hangul), Thai, Lao, Sundanese, and Javanese). There's a lot of dead languages that used scripts derived from Egyptian too but I didn't mention them because I'd be here all day listing stuff like Sogdian or Norse Runes.
Why is everyone down on Rust? Seriously. I don't know it but I've considered learning it and it appeals to me and people literally scoff when I mention it. Saw it referred to as a meme language on Lemmy, which is built in Rust. What am I missing?
I think rust has good ideas and may even become the default systems language in the mid-term. I find it irritating that there is a very vocal subset of rust proponents that tend to insist that every project in every language needs to be rewritten in rust immediately. I suspect that is also why other people are down on rust.
Imo it's bc it's the new kid on the block. Yes it's 10 years old but barely becoming common use in production and government mandates are only speeding that up. In actuality it's a great language and has been hyped for a few years by people who actually use it. Python went through the same thing in the 2010s where devs really tried clowning on it, now it's used everywhere.
For me "The Critical Flaw" of rust is its compiler. And requirent of 12 GB of disk space to compile just the frontend of compiler. Even GCC will all frontends(C, C++, Ada, Fortran, Modula-2, JIT) requires less space.
But joke is probably about "rewrite in rust" culture.
that's because Rust is more modern and in modern days we don't rly have hard disk limitation, also it's probably because the compiler tells you the solution to most problems
i think it’s mainly people being cranky and set in their ways. they got used to working around all the footguns/bad design decisions of the C/C++ specifications and really don’t want to feel like it was all for nothing. they’re comfortable with C/C++, and rust is new and uncomfortable. i think for some people, being a C/C++ developer is also a big part of their identity, and it might be uncomfortable to let that go.
i also think there’s a historical precedent for this kind of thing: when a new way of doing things emerges, many of the people who grew up doing it the old way get upset about it and refuse to accept that the new way might be an improvement.
Is Rust as close to the metal as C? Seems like there would still be a need for C. I could see Rust replacing Java as something that's so ceremonial and verbose, but from my limited perspective as a sometimes java dev, having only the most glancing experience with C, it seems like C would be hard to replace because of what it is. Buy I honestly don't know much about Rust either, I just think JS is so finicky and unpredictable whereas web assembly seems extremely fast and stable.
It's like a good C++ that is actually able to replace it. There are lots of places where a good C++ is useful. Like everything that needs low latency and low resource usage.
But it's not an easy language, so (I'm guessing) people who see everyone loving it but are unable to learn it start to suffer some sort of cognitive dissonance. If it's too difficult for me to learn, that must be its fault, not mine.
Cause it’s a C++ replacement when said audience never asked for one. It’s great but it’s still waaaayy too early, people need to slowly get comfortable with it.
Do you like Russian, tho? Some Russians I've encountered did find it overcomplicated at times... Но в целом понимаю: мне норм заходит энглиш, а жабаскрипт вообще мимо
PHP is Russian. Used to be huge, caused lots of problems, now slowly dwindling away. Its supporters keep saying how it's still better than the competition.
I just have some high school Latin from long ago, but if you parse "fancy" as "ornamental at the expense of utility", then I think it's a fair description.
Python is Spanish; a ton of people learned a bit in school and never picked it back up again. Places that speak it natively all have their own conventions because, even though the native languages were replaced by colonizers, a lot of the native languages patterns remained in place. Most places that speak it are super welcoming and stoked that you're trying to learn.
I think Perl is closer to Esperanto - the vast majority of people will never want to learn it and the people that know it won't stfu about how everyone should use it! And they could all use a shower!
You... you shut up! Excuse me, I have to go take a shower:-) (/s, edit: to be clear on both sentences here)
Anyway you're right (no /s) - at one point it filled in a gap between the likes of C++ and Assembly on the one hand and shell scripting (bash, awk, grep, sed, each with its own syntax and very little of that shared in common with one another) and I guess Fortran on the other. I still prefer it enormously to everything else - it's quirky but fun:-) - though I get why a less experienced person should choose Python and stick with it, even as we all wish that there was another alternative that would work better than either.
And since I can't resist: Perl is 8-20x faster than Python, and major websites like DuckDuckGo and booking.com use it. Sigh....I guess it's time for that shower now:-).
I want to disagree on German. It isn't verbose. We've got several words where there isn't an equivalent in pretty much any other languages. Including Schadenfreude und Torschlusspanik (the feeling that you are getting older l, can't find a partner and will die alone).
The same EU legal text has in German 22.118 words Vs English 24.698.
The making me cry part, that's fair. Overcomplicated, could be worse.
I think word count is not the best metric precisely because of what you mention. "Krankenversicherungskarte" is one word vs the three word "health insurance card", but they convey the same information in roughly the same amount of characters.
Overall I don't find German particularly verbose, only sometimes a small phrase is condensed into a single word.
I don’t know german but it seems to be more logical to have one word for “health insurance card” since it describes one class of objects. Better than spelling 3 nouns where one partially describes what object is and other nouns act like clarification
I wonder what the best programming analogue is for combining words into one where other languages keep them separate; maybe the functional-style chains of adapters?
I was tempted to say Ruby, but based on my friends that are learning (or tried to learn Japanese), it seems like Ruby is trying to be the opposite. So not sure.
Ruby would maybe fit with toki pona : terse, simple, predictable.
Ruby is literally Japanese. It was invented there. Plus a Danish guy popularized it outside of Japan. Like how weebs spurred interest in Japan and the Japanese language outside Japan.
as someone with some knowledge of japanese, japanese is extraordinarily terse, simple, and predictable. anyone who's seen some anime should be familiar with this - there's an incredible number of set phrases that carry a conversation in a precise way (that minimizes surprise)
Can't imagine there is any. You need to learn three scripts to read Japanese fluently IINM.
Katagana, Hirigana and something else... Probably someone who speaks Japanese can say.
The something else is called kanji, and are very complicated characters stolen from China with many meanings and pronunciation. Learning Japanese is very 楽しい (it is really)
just as a point of contention, english also has two character sets (compare A and a), and english doesn't even do anything with that, the capital letters exist for purely frustrating reasons
Rust is more like Esperanto isn’t it? It’s Latin, but regularized and with the rough edges sanded off.
Python is more like Spanish. A billion speakers in the world, and really easy to pick up a few phrases, but a small European minority still think they run it.
Rust is more like Lojban. Its adherents are just as excited to tell you about it and it too was created to fix all those pesky problems from people using their language imprecisely.
Its standard library reads like someone's Object Oriented Programming 101 final project, and they probably got a B- for it. Everything works and follows OO principles, but they didn't stop to think about how it's actually going to be used.
Let's try to read a file line-by-line:
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("sample.txt"));
String line = reader.readLine();
We're having to instantiate two objects (FileReader and then BufferedReader) just to get an object that has a readLine() method. Why? Can't BufferedReader take a file name on its own and work it out? Or FileReader just provides readLine() itself?
Not only that, but being parsimonious with what we import would result in:
But we're much more likely to be lazy and import everything with import java.io.*;. Which is sloppy, but I understand.
I can see what they were thinking when separating these concerns, but it resulted in more complexity than necessary.
There's a concept of "Huffman Coding" in language design. The term itself comes from data compression, but it can be generalized to mean that things you do often in a programming language should be short and easy. The above is not good Huffman Coding.
Library built this way because it supposed to be flexible and provide ground for complex usecases. It can only be flexible if your API works with simple abstractions which you can then compose. It’s not driven by “I need this specific utility for this specific scenario”. That would be zoo you have in JS where you have 10 ways to iterate over array and 9 of them wrong for your scenario.
Java’s OO is great because they design library with SRP in mind making sure there is few but good ways to do things.
BufferedReader cannot accept file name because it makes arbitrary reader… well buffered. It’s not BufferedFileReader, even that would accept something like Path or File, not string, because File can be remote file, should Reader now know all possible local and remote protocols and path formats? What else it must do?
Having it designed the way it is, allows Java to have utilities for various scenarios. Your scenario covered by standard lib too. See Files.readAllLines which, surprise-surprise, built on top of BufferedReader.
I think a lot of it is "ceremony", so it's pretty common in java to:
create a get method for every object variable
create a set method for every object variable
Then add on top that you have the increased code of type annotations PLUS the increased code of having to check if a value is null all the time because all types are nullable.
None of that is hugely complicated compared to sone of the concepts in say Rust, but it does lead to a codebase with a lot more lines of code than you'd see in other similar languages.
Java itself is kind of blissful in how restricted and straightforward it is.
Java programs, however, tend to be very large and sprawling code-bases built on even bigger mountains of shared libraries. This is a product of the language's simplicity, the design decisions present in the standard library, and how the Java community chooses to solve problems as a group (e.g. "dependency injection"). This presents a big learning challenge to people encountering Java projects on the job: there's a huge amount of stuff to take in. Were Java a spoken language it would be as if everyone talked in a highly formal and elaborate prose all the time.
People tend to conflate these two learning tasks (language vs practice), lumping it all together as "Java is complicated."
$0.02: Java is the only technology stack where I have encountered a logging plugin designed to filter out common libraries in stack traces. The call depth on J2EE architecture is so incredibly deep at times, this is almost essential to make sense of errors in any reasonable amount of time. JavaScript, Python, PHP, Go, Rust, ASP, C++, C#, every other language and framework I have used professionally has had a much shallower call stack by comparison. IMO, this is a direct consequence of the sheer volume of code present in professional Java solutions, and the complexity that Java engineers must learn to handle.
Some articles showing the knock-on effects of this phenomenon:
Char count for same functionality is still at least double in java vs python. It just feels like a chore to me. jetbrains helped, but still python is just so light
I unironically think it would be hilarious to write a borrow-checked version of Адрес. (The Soviet version of C - or rather C is a version of it, given that Адрес was first compiled in '55)
Not surprised. The Russian Wikipedia page on it is just a stub. The English one is actually longer.
I can't find any online introductions to it or compilers for it either, in English or написал по-Русски. Or Ukrainian for that matter, assuming I'd know it if I see it, although the Wikipedia page is longer.
D: Esperanto. Highly derivative of C (Latin), designed by people previously writing compilers. It's not being taken seriously as such.
Russian is nowadays being speaken by right-wing authoritarians instead, and any programmer that is auth-right is either coding in C/C++, or a Javascript/Python dev pretending to be a C/C++ dev to "gatekeep" nulangs (sic).
Surprised nobody has complained so far about the Rust comparison. I guess any objection would appear to prove the point, or at least reinforce the "evangelist" stereotype.
Man, world is not only europe and west, world is big. The Turks (huns are turk) came to Europe and the migration of tribes began, other nations began to form.
oddly enough those also correspond approximately to how well I (native German speaker) know each of these languages; but why is there a stereotype that us Python devs and Esperantists need to shower more? :(
Kia domaĝo. La unua programlingvo kiun mi lernis estis Python. Ĝi multe helpis min kompreni programadon kaj lerni aliajn programlingvojn. Simile estas kun Esperanto. Ĝi helpis min lerni la francan kaj faciligis la lernadon de alia gramatikaĵo.
Literally all of these languages are rooted in English.
C: printf()
C++: cout
JavaScript: document.write() or window.print()
Java: system.out.println()
Python: print()
Rust: print()
Exactly zero of those reference a language other than English. I'm not even a linguist and this is just silly. It's literally part of why English is becoming the dominant world language, because if you learn computer programming you basically have to learn English.