| Good questions, not sure I can answer satisfactorily :) > Terrible compared to what? Terrible compared to other available programming languages. > What do you find a better language? Lisps, Haskell, Erlang, Rust, but even eg Python, Ruby, C, Java. > What makes a language terrible for you? Allowing me to do unreasonable things and resulting in unreasonable behaviour. Eg JavaScript: [] + {} == [object Object] {} + [] == 0 > Is COBOL terrible or C Or Go? Programming languages are products of their time and context. When COBOL was created, it might've been the best there was. By now, I think COBOL can be considered worse than many alternatives. If someone decided to write a non-toy greenfield project in COBOL today, I'd be surprised and might question their sanity. C has two things going for it: it's a simple language and it's close to the hardware. I wouldn't call it terrible. Go, now I really dislike Go, but I think there might be situations where it's the right tool for the job. Simple web services perhaps? PHP was terrible already when it was created. I don't hold that against Rasmus, he just wanted to get simple things done, and didn't even intend to create a full-fledged programming language. JavaScript... Brendan Eich wanted to put Scheme scripting in the browser, but because Java was popular, he was told by management to make it look more like Java and also to call it JavaScript. Oh also he had like a two week deadline or something. Yea, I dunno... good hard questions :) |