this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
167 points (94.2% liked)

Programming

17524 readers
591 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Why are there so many programming languages? And why are there still being so many made? I would think you would try to perfect what you have instead of making new ones all the time. I understand you need new languages sometimes like quantumcomputing or some newer tech like that. But for pc you would think there would be some kind of universal language. I'm learning java btw. I like programming languages. But was just wondering.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Partly because sometimes a particular language suits a particular problem set.

Partly because people just like writing computer languages.

But mostly because people mistake the fundamental problem of programming, which is programming is really hard. So someone comes along and thinks “Programming is really hard, it must be a problem with the languages available” and sets out to write a computer language that makes programming easy.

But all that happens is they trade one set of difficulties for another set of difficulties. They might succeed in making writing the initial version easier, but make maintaining that code harder. Or they might solve some memory allocation problems, but create performance issues.

Either way, someone will write a language because they think they will help solve the issue of programming being hard, and fail. Because the really hard bit about programming is about understanding everything the program needs to do, in microscopic detail, and translating that into a structure that best fits the problem; not the actual coding itself.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

This is why we need low code solutions /s