Coding styles – styles of speech
Juten Tach,
i was just reading the article of Steve Yegge, ‘Portrait of a noob‘. Man, Steve is writing huge articles, … but that’s not the topic.
He talks a lot about coding and “Meta-coding” styles. How noobs would be commenting too much and writing fluffy code with lots of whitespace.
I have read a lot of articles about coding style, i actually like reading those. You get to know different point of views on this after a while and it’s fun to read how other people work. Since software developers use programming languages to write their software, of course they think a lot about how to write it. Not only in terms of structure and architecture, but also in terms of how to “say” things, means how to tell the compiler in an efficient and elegant way, what to do. I am fascinated about programming languages and i wonder, how they relate to real languages. Do programming languages evolve in the same way, human languages do? What are the factors, that lead to changes in programming versus human languages?
In human languages, we have slang and dialects. Is there something like that in programming languages? If Steve is talking about compressed code, is that the ‘slang’ in programming languages?
I wonder, if there will ever be a time, when programming languages will feel like a human language. I am not sure, if this would actually fulfill our needs.
Hi Sven.
Probably one of the things Steve Yegge misses in the post is that a language has much more than just telling the compiler what to do. If you happen to visit my blog someday, please take a look at the DSL (Domain Specific Languages) post, where we talk about languages oriented to one specific domain, using vocabulary and grammar of that domain only. The idea is languages are there to help you solve a real life problem, not to help the compiler. Languages are for you (and your peers), not for the machine. And maybe not all languages are meant for a computer to read them.
Interesting…
William Martinez.
Hi William,
yes, that’s what i am not so sure about. Are programming languages made solely for the programmer and his domain, thus not taking the architecture of the computer into consideration? I cannot believe this. I am playing with ANTLR a little bit for a while and i get the feeling, that quite a few parts of a programming language are made also for the benefit of a compiler better understanding the code (braces for example, i am currently working on a little grammar, that works with indents instead of braces and it makes a not so nice grammar). Of course, the focus of each language surely is to solve the problems of developers but i think some of the formalisms in programming languages also come from the machines, where they have to work on and their limits in understanding the language.