Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
- "We've got to start over from scratch" - Well, that's almost any academic language you find.
- "English phrases" - Well that's Cobol. You know, cargo cult English. (laughter)
- "Text processing doesn't matter much" - Fortran.
- "Simple languages produce simple solutions" - C.
- "If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a direct quote from the original awk page.
- "I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's obviously PHP. (laughter and applause)
- "You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language designed by an electrical engineer. (laughter)
- "This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" - The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this… problem.
- "Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.
- "The specification is good enough" - Ada.
- "Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.
- "The common kernel should be as small as possible" - Forth.
- "Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. (laughter)
- "Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. (laughter)
- "Everything is a vector" - APL.
- "Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)
- "Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. (laughter)
- "Everything is a function" - Haskell. (laughter)
- "Programmers should never have been given free will" - Obviously, Python. (laughter)
So my psychological conjecture is that normal people, if they perceive that a computer language is forcing them to learn theory, they won't like it. In other words, hide the fancy stuff. It can be there, just hide it.
| Author | Larry Wall |
| Work | Present Continuous, Future Perfect |