why the machine like syntax?

[roosevelt]

Hi,

 

I have been programming for many years now. And I am damn good at it if I say so myself. But what I never liked in programming was the syntax we use. Why is that the compilers or the interpreters are designed to make use of {}, function etc... to distinguish between objects, functions, etc...

 

For example in JAVA you have:

class MyClass {
    String MyProp;
    Integer MyProTwo;
 
    public void hello(){
 
    }
}

Why can't we make JAVA, PHP or C++ compilers to compile or interpret syntaxes that are more elegant. For example:

class MyClass
    s:myprop
    i:myprotwo
    v:hello
          print "i'm awesome"
    end

Or

make class MyClass. Define properties myprop,myproptwo. Make function hello print "I'm awesome"

What I am aiming for is something what .NET has done. You can program .NET applications in C#, J#, C++ etc... Is it possible to have some kind of XSTL bridge, so we programmers can design our own programming syntax? :p

 

myownsynxtax -> XSTL Template -> Mapped to JAVA/C# Native syntax.

[AJerman]

Because it adds a lot more structure to the code. I personally can't stand languages like VB because I feel like it's a lazy language. It lets you do things that I'd consider bad habit, but work perfectly fine if you do them right, like less structure, sloppy variable definitions, etc. Sure, if you do it right it works as well as anything else, but it's also easy to make a mistake that's hard to find if you ask me. But that's why there are several different languages, so you can choose what you like. If you don't like a more structured language, then don't use it. I learned programming with C and C++ though so like I said, I can't stand the more loosely structured languages, but that's just my opinion.

[threetonesun]

Just code in Python. :laugh:

[notchinese]

So, you are asking why can't you make the class completely unreadable?

[neufuse Veteran]

so how would you handle user defined types and classes? if we use single letters for system types ok, but in the end it's just going to get messy really fast

[Phouchg]

Anything other than rigidly defined structures and keywords are prone to be ambiguous statements. We humans understand each other using natural language fairly well, but every word and combination of words (number of which is rising almost exponentially) still has numerous interpretations depending on context, experience and present circumstances. And so terrible misunderstandings happen, often to tragicomic extent. Even with the best learning techniques and complex actual AI machines would still fail to interpret things the right way and meanwhile waste resources on very complex AI operations. Long story short - if machines would become more human-like, they'd also err like humans.

 

And then - even with rigidly defined structures each language has many coding, naming, spacing and newline conventions that makes readability and reuse, among other things, a challenging affair. If anything, I'd ask for even more strict templates and removal of most conventions.

[firey]

wrote code like that in turing.  Made it difficult to find where I went wrong with things, took a lot longer to debug.

Plus, it's a pain in the butt trying to read someone else's code when it's clear, let alone a big block of text.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Some existing languages are very succint. Take a look at Python or F# for example. Here is the quicksort algorithm in F#:

let rec quicksort = function
   | [] -> []                         
   | first::rest -> 
        let smaller,larger = List.partition ((>=) first) rest 
        List.concat [quicksort2 smaller; [first]; quicksort2 larger]

It's in general not possible to automatically translate programming languages from one to the other because they express different concepts. C++ templates for example have no equivalent in any similar language. .NET allows for language interoperability because they all compile to a common intermediate representation (IL), but even then it's not always possible to decompile F# code to C# or vice-versa.

 

I find that succintness is not an ideal, it's more of a dial that can be turned too far in either direction. Too verbose (i.e. Visual Basic), and it gets tedious to filter out the redundant information. Too succint (i.e. Perl), and it becomes hard to understand what the code means. The C family of langages has been extremely popular because it hits a nice balance between the two.

[+virtorio MVC]

  Quote

Why can't we make JAVA, PHP or C++ compilers to compile or interpret syntaxes that are more elegant. For example:

Well, for a start, they wouldn't be Java, PHP or C++ compilers.

 

There are languages that have a "looser" structure than C-style languages. Personally I don't much care for any of them, I like the structure/rules that define C-style languages.

[rfirth]

  On 02/07/2013 at 19:43, roosevelt said:

What I am aiming for is something what .NET has done. You can program .NET applications in C#, J#, C++ etc... Is it possible to have some kind of XSTL bridge, so we programmers can design our own programming syntax? :p

 

myownsynxtax -> XSTL Template -> Mapped to JAVA/C# Native syntax.

 

Go for it. You can always design your own language extensions, or make your own front-end to a compiler.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Projects/polyglot/

 

It's basically a source-to-source translation from one language (your creation) to Java:

your_language -> polyglot+your_extension -> pure Java

 

I have written extensions to the Java language before... added Java language support for singleton objects by adding an 'object' keyword, used instead of 'class' to make a class a singleton. Also added support for strong mobility, which is pretty cool.

You can change up the Java grammar completely, make it your own.

[astropheed Veteran]

Python: 

class MyClass:
    def hello(self):
        print("I'm awesome")

No need to define those redundant properties.

[Lant]

  On 12/07/2013 at 01:27, astropheed said:

No need to define those redundant properties.

Some times there is a need, static typing and dynamic typing both have their uses.

See http://www.mypy-lang.org/ for a python language extension

[kjordan2001]

{ ... } adds a new scope.  You can use that in any area actually and not just around a loop, function, or class.

 

For example:

function test() {
  System.out.println("New scope below!");
  {
     String y = "Test";
     System.out.println(y); //y is only accessible here
  }
  System.out.println(y); //Can't use y here!
}

[Karl L.]

  On 02/07/2013 at 20:00, threetonesun said:

Just code in Python. :laugh:

 

My first thought when I saw the OP's first "more elegant" example was also "Python!" That said, I don't think that Python is as loose as the OP thinks programming languages should be.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

Have you considered Ruby or Coffeescript?

[Brian M. Veteran]

Work in python for a while, and you'll soon appreciate the braces!

There's only so many times you can start using an editor which uses tabs instead of spaces, only to be chasing a seemingly never-ending "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level".

[roosevelt]

I looked into Python and the syntaxes Python offers is just what I was looking for. I also noticed how dead simple Python makes to do certain things (e.g. reading, wrting files or connecting to db). However, in terms of reliabiity and time tested confidence... how good is Python? Java is quite strong, has years of reputation and I am confident it's not going away anytime soon if ever. How about Python... how strong is its community, development and the range of it's modules? I am pretty confident if I there is a feature that needs to be coded in JAVA, chances are its already done. Do you have the same level of confidence for Python?

 

I also looked into wxpython for the desktop GUI... but it choked on me right away. I want to use Python3, but wxpython doesn't seem to support Python 3 just yet. Kind of killed my dream of using the same language to make not just cross platform but web applications too :p

 

I wish JAVA syntaxes were like Python... life would be simpler. I am looking into Ruby as well... RoR already had me excited for a while but I abandoned it due to some of its missing features in compairson to CakePHP.

[astropheed Veteran]

  On 05/08/2013 at 19:20, Brian M said:

Work in python for a while, and you'll soon appreciate the braces!

There's only so many times you can start using an editor which uses tabs instead of spaces, only to be chasing a seemingly never-ending "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level".

 

Worked in Python for a while, I now hate braces.

 

  On 13/08/2013 at 06:13, roosevelt said:

I looked into Python and the syntaxes Python offers is just what I was looking for. I also noticed how dead simple Python makes to do certain things (e.g. reading, wrting files or connecting to db). However, in terms of reliabiity and time tested confidence... how good is Python? Java is quite strong, has years of reputation and I am confident it's not going away anytime soon if ever. How about Python... how strong is its community, development and the range of it's modules? I am pretty confident if I there is a feature that needs to be coded in JAVA, chances are its already done. Do you have the same level of confidence for Python?

 

Strong. I'm actually more confident in Python's survival. Java is about 1,700 severe security exploits away from someone somewhere thinking, "Hmm, maybe we should stop using this.". For some reason the first 1,699 didn't phase anyone. In all honesty neither are going away anytime soon. You're safe with Python.

[Karl L.]

Python has a very strong developer community and can definitely be considered mature. The official Python documentation is excellent, and many extremely useful modules ship with Python by default. If those do not suit your needs, you can find a wide variety of Python modules written by other developers.

 

On thing you should be aware of with Python is the difference between the 2.x and 3.x releases: they are intentionally incompatible. Code written for Python 2 likely will not run on Python 3 without some modification. That said, the changes are very well documented - including official documentation for porting Python 2 programs to Python 3 - and the rationale for the breakage is solid: consistency and scalability.

[roosevelt]

By the way I am playing around with Jython... and this blew my mind:

 

from javax.swing import JFrame, JLabel

def show_message_as_window(msg):
    frame = JFrame(msg,
                   defaultCloseOperation=JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE,
                   size=(100, 100),
                   visible=True)
    frame.contentPane.add(JLabel(msg))
    
show_message_as_window("testing...")

 

:o

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

You try writing in AppleScript for a while and you'll love the braces, they tried making that language "easy to use" by using lots of English terms and structure (There's nouns and verbs), but because they've based it off an actual language rather than syntax, it feels like you're reading/writing a badly written novel.

[Andre S. Veteran]

  On 13/08/2013 at 06:13, roosevelt said:

I looked into Python and the syntaxes Python offers is just what I was looking for. I also noticed how dead simple Python makes to do certain things (e.g. reading, wrting files or connecting to db). However, in terms of reliabiity and time tested confidence... how good is Python? Java is quite strong, has years of reputation and I am confident it's not going away anytime soon if ever. How about Python... how strong is its community, development and the range of it's modules? I am pretty confident if I there is a feature that needs to be coded in JAVA, chances are its already done. Do you have the same level of confidence for Python?

Python is very mature, although in general I think dynamic languages are on their way out. More and more you see statically typed languages offer the conciseness and productivity of dynamic languages, while offering the type safety, performance and tooling benefits of static typing, i.e. F# (.NET), Scala (Java), TypeScript (Web), Go (Native), Rust (Native), Cobra (.NET), etc.; to a certain extent C# and C++ since they both have limited type inference now (var/auto).

 

Since your original point of comparison was Java, you should note that Java is as verbose and inflexible as classic imperative/OO languages go; even in something relatively similar like C# it's often possible to express the same things in much less code, due to the more powerful type system, better designed libraries and more advanced language features. Overall I think there are much more significant factors than using braces to denote scope or having to prefix methods with their accessibility and return types.