All I said was that perhps there needs to be a movement to remove some of the differences in the behavior of programming languages; in effect an effort analogus to the movement to have a set of standards for html design so that coders don't have to code differently for four and five browsers, not to mention accounting for the bugs within those browsers that affect how pages are rendered. I'm not saying that there should be one syntax standard or even that, that would be a good idea, what I am saying is that it may be a good idea for all of these languages to come together and take features from each other where applicable. Maybe supporting ++ incrementation breaks something in a given language but how can it be naive to suggest that at the very least what that type of incrementation shorthand should be represented in some way across the board. For example maybe you use something like: a=(1) it depends. What you are suggesting is that the differences between languages are a good thing and thinking in different ways given the structure of a language is a good thing, and you are correct to a point the diversity also makes it more difficult for people to work effectively because they have to deal with two and three sometimes totally different ways of thinking. This kind of thing makes communication between different people more difficult than it would be if there was a common language that both could use to communicate. Saying that I am naive for suggesting this is like suggesting that it is a good idea to expect business people to speak nearly every language currently spoken on earth rather than gravitating towards a common language simply because the other languages exist in the first place. On 10/15/06, Austin Ziegler <halostatue / gmail.com> wrote: > On 10/15/06, Kevin Olemoh <darkintent / gmail.com> wrote: > > I wanted to add that it may not be so advantageous to have so many > > programming languages;unlike spoken languages which actually benefit > > from their diversity since they are allow humans to create entirely > > new concepts. Programming languages are somewhat restricted by how > > hardware actually works and hence perform the same functions with > > different ways of getting to the same result. Perhaps one method of > > dealing with the current trend of programmers being schooled in two or > > more languages just to be marketable is to try to standardize the > > behavior of various constructs across languages so things work more > > the same across the board. Granted this does happen somewhat > > naturally already what I am postulating is that it may be advantageous > > to actively try to direct this phenomena. > > > > It would keep things like this from happenning: > > > > a bunch of languages support += as a shorthand for incrementing accumulators > > > > A SQL implementation comes along and does not support this relatively > > common short hand..WTH Why??? > > > > Anyway that is a discussion unto itself. > > Oh, please. Your thoughts here are naż×e, at best. Let's pick on one > of the syntax things that Ruby doesn't support: ++. There are very > good reasons that Ruby doesn't support this syntactic increment > shorthand -- and there's no way to make Ruby support it in a way that > doesn't break a lot of other things or is thread safe. (It's also only > possible to support the prefix form, not the postfix form.) > > Language -- whether it's computer language or human language -- > changes the way that you think. When I work in C, i think in much > lower-level terms. This is the *purpose* of C -- a portable assembly, > if you will. When I work in C++, I add a bit of object oriented and > template magic to C. My concepts in C++ are still pretty low-level. > When I move to shell scripting, I think in different terms yet -- I > think in terms of "what tools do I have that will help me do what I > must do?" And when I'm in Ruby, I think in terms that are much more > complex than I do with almost any other language. > > You say that a bunch of languages support += -- I can think of at > least as many that *don't* support += at all, and even among those > that do support it, there are some that are just whacked out. > > The problem we have isn't that programmers must know two or more > languages; it's that there's too many programmers out there who barely > know one. I personally know at least fifteen, although I haven't used > half of them in years. But I use at least four on a regular basis at > work. > > I have learned a lot from every single language -- and look forward to > learning even more so that I can advance the state of *my* art. > > -austin > -- > Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ > * austin / halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ > * austin / zieglers.ca > >