this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Until you know a few very different languages, you don't know what a good language is, so just relax on having opinions about which languages are better. You don't need those opinions. They just get in your way.
Don't even worry about what your first language is. The CS snobs used to say BASIC causes brain damage and that us '80s microcomputer kids were permanently ruined ... but that was wrong. JavaScript is fine, C# is fine ... as long as you don't stop there.
(One of my first programming languages after BASIC was ZZT-OOP, the scripting language for Tim Sweeney's first published game, back when Epic Games was called Potomac Computer Systems. It doesn't have numbers. If you want to count something, you can move objects around on the game board to count it. If ZZT-OOP doesn't cause brain damage, no language will.)
Please don't say the new language you're being asked to learn is "unintuitive". That's just a rude word for "not yet familiar to me". So what if the first language you used required curly braces, and the next one you learn doesn't? So what if type inference means that you don't have to write
inton your ints? You'll get used to it.You learned how to use curly braces, and you'll learn how to use something else too. You're smart. You can cope with indentation rules or significant capitalization or funny punctuation. The idea that some features are "unintuitive" rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.
Well i mean... that's kinda what "unintuitive" means. Intuitive, i.e. natural/obvious/without effort. Having to gain familiarity sorta literally means it's not that, thus unintuitive.
I dont disagree with your sentiment, but these people are using the correct term. For example, python len(object) instead of obj.len() trips me up to this day because 99% of the time i think [thing] -> [action], and most language constructs encourage that. If I still regularly type an object name, and then have to scroll the cursor back over and type "len(", i cant possibly be using my intuition. It's not the language's "fault" - because it's not really "wrong" - but it is unintuitive.
If you only know C and you're looking at Python, the absence of curly braces on code blocks is temporarily unfamiliar to you.
But if you only know Python and you're looking at C, the fact that indentation doesn't matter is temporarily unfamiliar to you.
Once you learn the new language, it's not unfamiliar to you anymore.
"Unintuitive" often suggests that there's something wrong with the language in a global sense, just because it doesn't look like the last one you used — as if the choice to use (or not use) curly braces is natural and anything else is willfully perverse on the part of the language designer.
I mean only if you consider "Intuition" to be some monolithic, static thing that's also identical for everyone. Everyone has their own intuition, and their intuition changes over time. Intuition is akin to an opinion - it's built up based on your own past experiences.
I don't think it's that deep. All people mean when they say it is that "[thing] defied my expectation/prior experience". It's like saying "sea food tastes bad". There's an implicit "to me" at the end, it's obvious i'm not saying "sea food factually tastes bad, and anyone who says they like it is wrong or lying".
No programming language is “natural/obvious/without effort”.
You could say that about anything. Of course you have to learn something the first time and it's "unintuitive" then. Intuition is literally an expectation based on prior experience.
Intuitive patterns exist in programming languages. For example, most conditionals are denoted with "if", "else", and "while". You would find it intuitive if a new programming language adhered to that. You'd find it unintuitive if the conditionals were denoted with "dnwwkcoeo", "wowpekg cneo", and "coebemal".
Languages also have inner consistency. E.g. the mentioned python len function is inconsistent with the rest of the same language - and that is a statement that is true in itself, without an external reference point.
Yes, I agree that the
len()thing in Python, and inconsistency in general, is bad. But pretty much all popular languages have many inconsistencies.But there are languages that require varying degrees of effort to become natural. Something like Malbolge will pretty much never be natural while something like Python can become natural to you in a few days.
Yeah. The original comment was about programmers who say that a language is “unintuitive” because it doesn't look like another language they know.
Idk, I don't see a problem with saying a new language is unintuitive. For example, in js I still consider the horrible type coercion and the "fix" with the triple-equals very unintuitive indeed. On the flip side, when learning C# I found the multiple ways of making comparisons to be pretty intuitive, and not footguns.
Yeah. I've written in six or so different languages and am using Go now for the first time. Even then, I'm trying to be optimistic and acknowledge things are just different or annoying for me. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with the language.
ZZT-OOP is fun to work with though, definitely not meant for doing anything more complex than light gameplay, and yet people have done ridiculous things with it.
Though I personally did most of my coding in that vein in MegaZeux with their Robotic language, which is basically ZZT-OOP++.
I still think ruby is a bad language, even though I agree with you
I found ruby horribly confusing until I got over the intial learning bump.
Now I love it. It really is lovely. In terms of design that is. Not sure about the monkeypatching
I really don't like how rails brings things into scope and you just have no idea what's there or how it got there unless you know all of the conventions. I guess that's a rails issue and not ruby though.
I learned in python and C++ so I'm biased towards things that are extremely specific. Definitely doesn't mean ruby is necessarily bad, I just don't like it.
I'm one of those weirdoes who likes ruby and has never used rails, so no opinion there.
This is wise advice for ANY domain of knowledge.
Lotta people get a little fragment of knowledge on something, then shut down their brain and stop accepting new input. But life is change, and to be able to change and learn new things you need to keep your mind open. Being able to relax on having opinions and keep learning and moving along is very important.
This is very true! Languages being unintuitive also becomes less of an issue the more languages you look into. There will be many concepts that multiple languages have since ultimately they are all trying to do similar things and the more you learn the more you will recognize making it easier to get into even more languages.