Steve Yegge's Rant on Languages

I stumbled on the following blogpost originally made in 2004 (updated in 2006) by Steve Yegge:
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel

I vaguely recall the name and from the page that linked to his post, he apparently worked at Amazon for a time before moving on to Google. That said, I highly suggest taking a look at the original blog post as it's a pretty fascinating (and opinionated) read. I'm amazed by how much I agree with, though I didn't like his C++ bashing. But then, his comments about only liking C++ when he was in college are true of me as well. I suspect if I actually had to do something real in C++ (after having used Java) I'd want to blow my brains out.

In any event, a few highlights from my perspective:

C

You just have to know C. Why? Because for all practical purposes, every computer in the world you'll ever use is a von Neumann machine, and C is a lightweight, expressive syntax for the von Neumann machine's capabilities.
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You also have to know C because it's the language that Unix is written in, and happens also to be the language that Windows and virtually all other operating systems are written in, because they're OSes for von Neumann machines, so what else would you use? Anything significantly different from C is going to be too far removed from the actual capabilities of the hardware to perform well enough, at least for an OS — at least in the last century, which is when they were all written.

C++

C++ is the dumbest language on earth, in the very real sense of being the least sentient.
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Stuff takes forever to do around here. An Amazon engineer once described our code base as "a huge mountain of poop, the biggest mountain you've ever seen, and your job is to crawl into the very center of it, every time you need to fix something."
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It's all C++'s fault. Don't argue. It is. We're using the dumbest language in the world. That's kind of meta-dumb, don't you think? The original brilliant guys and gals here only allowed two languages in Amazon's hallowed source repository: C and Lisp

Lisp/Emacs

All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. Not the great gal in the cube next to you. Not Fred, the amazing guy down the hall. I'm talking about the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings, the Donald Knuths, the Paul Grahams2, the Jamie Zawinskis, the Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it. Go look over Paul Nordstrom's shoulder while he works sometime, if you don't believe me. It's a real eye-opener for someone who's used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs their whole career.
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Now C++, Java and Perl are all we write in. The elders have moved on to greener pastures too.
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Religion isn't the opiate of the masses anymore, Karl. IDEs are.

Java

Java is simultaneously the best and the worst thing that has happened to computing in the past 10 years.
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But Java's missing some nice features from C++, such as pass-by-reference(-to-stack-object), typedefs, macros, and operator overloading. Stuff that comes in handy now and again.
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Oh, and multiple inheritance, which now I've come to appreciate in my old age. If you think my Opinionated Elf was a good counterpoint to polymorphism dogma, I've got several brilliant examples of why you need multiple inheritance, or at least Ruby-style mixins or automatic delegation. Ask me about the Glowing Sword or Cloak of Thieving sometime. Interfaces suck.

Gosling even said, a few years ago, that if he had to do it all over again,he wouldn't have used interfaces.

But that's just exactly what the problem with Java is. When James said that, people were shocked. I could feel the shock waves, could feel the marketing and legal folks at Sun maneuvering to hush him up, brush it off, say it wasn't so.

The problem with Java is that people are blinded by the marketing hype. That's the problem with C++, with Perl, with any language that's popular, and it's a serious one, because languages can't become popular without hype. So if the language designer suggests innocently that the language might not have been designed perfectly, it's time to shoot the language designer full of horse tranquilizers and shut down the conference.
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Bad developers, who constitute the majority of all developers worldwide, can write bad code in any language you throw at them.
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When in doubt, hire Java programmers who are polyglots, who detest large spongy frameworks like J2EE and EJB, and who use Emacs. All good rules of thumb.

Perl

There are "better" languages than Perl — hell, there are lots of them, if you define "better" as "not being insane". Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, gosh, I could probably name 20 or 30 languages that are "better" than Perl, inasmuch as they don't look like that Sperm Whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan over the summer. Whale guts everywhere, covering cars, motorcycles, pedestrians. That's Perl. It's charming, really.
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But Perl has many, many things going for it that, until recently, no other language had, and they compensated for its exo-intestinal qualities. You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume. It's quite useful. And so is Perl.
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Now you can't read a book or tutorial or PowerPoint on Perl without spending at least a third of your time learning about "references", which are Larry's pathetic, broken, Goldbergian fix for his list-flattening insanity. But Perl's marketing is so incredibly good that it makes you feel as if references are the best thing that ever happened to you. You can take a reference to anything! It's fun! Smells good, too!
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Like I said, though — until recently, nothing could get the job done like Perl could.

Ruby

Anyway, Ruby stole everything good from Perl; in fact, Matz, Ruby's author (Yukihiro Matsumoto, if I recall correctly, but he goes by "Matz"), feels he may have stolen a little too much from Perl, and got some whale guts on his shoes. But only a little.
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And he somehow made it all work together so well that you don't even notice that it has all that stuff. I learned Ruby faster than any other language, out of maybe 30 or 40 total; it took me about 3 days before I was more comfortable using Ruby than I was in Perl, after eight years of Perl hacking. It's so consistent that you start being able to guess how things will work, and you're right most of the time. It's beautiful. And fun. And practical.
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The leap from Perl to Ruby is as significant as the leap from C++ to Java, but without any of the downsides, because Ruby's essentially a proper superset of Perl's functionality, whereas Java took some things away that people missed, and didn't offer real replacements for them.

Python

Python would have taken over the world, but it has two fatal flaws: the whitespace thing, and the permafrost thing.
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The whitespace thing is simply that Python uses indentation to determine block nesting. It forces you to indent everything a certain way, and they do this so that everyone's code will look the same. A surprising number of programmers hate this, because it feels to them like their freedom is being taken away; it feels as if Python is trampling their constitutional right to use shotgun formatting and obfuscated one-liners.
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What's the frost thing, you ask? Well, I used to have a lot of exceptionally mean stuff written here, but since Python's actually quite pleasant to work with (if you can overlook its warts), I no longer think it's such a great idea to bash on Pythonistas. The "frost thing" is just that they used to have a tendency to be a bit, well, frosty. Why?

Because they were so tired of hearing about the whitespace thing!