Pointless Languages

[erikwebb]

This is a random question, but what does everyone think is the most pointless and useless language ever? My personal vote is for Python, after all - correct me if I'm wrong, but what is there special about Python different from other languages?

[marianna]

i would not pick on python - it has it's place and its history
you'd be syrprised how many companies use it

i think every language has it's place and point (yes, even ones i dislike as VB)
If you ask me, I think Microsoft's whole .NET thing is fairly lame - it's just an attempt to monopolize the platform for softwre developement
They take perfectly good languages and replace them - what do they need to do that for?

[Bunkermaster]

well Python may be coming ack pretty hard with Zope...

My pointless language would be... hmmm let me think... VBScript (for IE not talking about the actual only alternative to a shell that windows have :rolleyes: ).

[stuartc1]

Well its got to be PHP, hasnt it ?, I mean who uses PHP anyway ? its got to be one of the least used languages on the Internet today, and it rubbish. Now VBScript, now your talking thats the language to use, isnt it ? he, he, he.

... only joking.

By the way, I think python has got pretty good OO for a scripting language... well this is what I hear... so I guess it must be pretty good. and I hear it has quite a bit following, and its growing.

[largo]

Coldfusion :)

With all the "for dummies" books out there, if there was to be one for CF, it's be called "for retards". (too harsh?... vicious comment welcome.) :cool:

[Bunkermaster]

vicious comment.

CF as in cfm pages with very non standard tags?

hehe when I was a paid software quality engineer I used to be called to test the load of CFM servers... always funny to crash a server after 12 minutes of easy scripting.

[largo]

Vicious comment accepted.

We run cf-server on an NT box here... you sneeze in that room and it'll crash.

[Bunkermaster]

NT... :eek: sneez ?? VIRUS ALERT!!!!

/me hides nehind SOLARIS box

[largo]

Originally posted by marianna
If you ask me, I think Microsoft's whole .NET thing is fairly lame - it's just an attempt to monopolize the platform for softwre developement
They take perfectly good languages and replace them - what do they need to do that for?

well the flip side is, projects being developed in .net from scratch offer a fantastic library for developers. It's extensive and very well written making a lot of tasks easier. I have never used .net and know as much about it as I do about pig farming, but having spoken to 3 .net developers who have php roots, I think it probably wouldn't fall in the useless category. (Neither does CF -- and python certainly doesn't).

Flash? Can we go with that? Does that involve scripting? "I don't know flash" (add Dr.Evil accent)

[Bunkermaster]

flash has client side scripting and it IS useless (for blind people)

[erikwebb]

Sorry guys, you're totally right. I just did some research on Python and now I understand how stupid that comment must sound. So....now....I have to just ship on Python and, following suit, trash all those VB "programmers" out there. (And no, I'm not talking about you VB database programmers or anything. Just those 15 year-old "programmers" who think "Hello, world!" with some nifty graphics is a program.)

[Bunkermaster]

lol hello world hehe reminds me of a good one.
Couple years ago as a QA manager for a cellphone companyI had to test a SIEBEL project.
After 2 month of heavy coding these 5 SIEBEL experts had a marquee saying "We love M&Ms" and a 30 second delayed msgbox saying "Ho no we ain't got any M&M left". Apart from the it was standard Vanilla (no customization) SIEBEL
2 month 5 guys ( 2 x 20 x 5 = 200 days for a couple messages...)

guess the language...


VB :rolleyes:

[clearbreach]

I never knew what Python was until 4-ish months ago. I first learned about it when it was announced that it would be the scripting language for an upcoming game (SWAT: Urban Justice). Being even a little interested in programming and a fan of the game series, I drove straight into learning it.

I still think it's applications beyond the game are a tad ... "useless", but nonetheless it's quite an interesting language that I'm glad I took a bit of time to get into the basics of.

( erikwebb: us VB "programmers" have feelings too :p )

[Bunkermaster]

have a look at Zope and tell me if you still think Python is useless :)
http://www.zope.org

[dannys]

Well my vote would be Ruby - pretty much Python with some very minor syntax diffs, infact many people consider it to be little more than a Python ripoff (granted most of those people are Python users).

ASP/VBScript has to come pretty close - not even close to being usefull without a load of 3rd party extensions. And it's Win32 only (unless you count ChillSoft/Cobalt/Sun (or whoever owns it atm) ASP which can't even use the 3rd party extensions!)

There are probably loads of other 'niche' languages which were destined to take over the vorld but didn't (can anyone remember Rebol? :))

And as for that Perl thing - don't think that ever took off :-)

[Bunkermaster]

w00t!?!

Perl never took off??? I hope you're kidding me m8 cause it sure is a major dev language. It is a language you can use to do almost anything (from developing extensions to Rational Software products to developing load testing scripts). Most peeps ignore the powers and the vastness of the perl presence.

As far as ASP is concerned, the only ASP DOM that I ever found nice to use was the JScript ASP DOM BUT it's NOT documented and the VB one sucks BIG time.

Who remembers Cobol or Rexx? ;) (just kidding here... did you know some nutcase actually made a OO Cobol?? :eek: )

[dannys]

Perl never took off??? I hope you're kidding me m8 cause it sure is a major dev language. It is a language you can use to do almost anything (from developing extensions to Rational Software products to developing load testing scripts). Most peeps ignore the powers and the vastness of the perl presence.


Sarcasm was implied there.

I remember Rexx (Well the version I used was ARexx - pretty much the same thing)

[Bunkermaster]

woops, just woke up didn't get it

/me slaps himself with a large i-Mac USB toaster (w00t?)

[bealers]

Coldfusion

[dannys]

Yeah! How did I forget that one!

[Bunkermaster]

already mentioned twice I think ;)

[vaaaska]

Ah, the joy of reviving a long forgotten thread. Since Ruby was mentioned here (in 2002!) I thought this would be a fun place to post a link to this online movie regarding how to do things with it - quite neat:

Ruby demo movie (http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov)

Oh, the joy of type...

[Weedpacket]

I'd pick HQ9+, except it's none too powerful.

4DL, because the IDE is so fiddly to use.

Spoon, because who needs Huffman-encoded Brainf**k?

[RossC0]

Latin!

Seriously: Coldfusion is a lovely language - easy to learn, friendly, fast only problem it has a tendancy to fall over alot!!

[laserlight]

My personal vote is for Python, after all - correct me if I'm wrong, but what is there special about Python different from other languages?
Eric Raymond claims that it is a good starting language for a beginner.
I'm for Python as my favourite C/C++ build system, SCons (http://www.scons.org), is written in Python.

My vote would be INTERCAL - but then even INTERCAL may have its (ab)uses....

[goldbug]

(just kidding here... did you know some nutcase actually made a OO Cobol?? :eek: )
http://www.adtools.com/products/windows/netcobol.html :)

[stevesweetland]

welsh.

sod programming languages, at least there is something that can be achieved with python. even delphi has its uses, but in a broader spectrum, theres just no need for welsh.

says i.

[pohopo]

I can only think of one language that was useless when it came out and is useless now and that is the client side VBScript that only works in IE. The worst idea ever thought of.

[Merve]

English. Who needs that? ;)




Seriously, ColdFusion. Our city library system uses it. The system is down a quarter of the time, and half of it isn't working another quarter of the time. (And it's still really crappy the remaining half of the time.) :mad:

[LoganK]

Coldfusion does suck...although I'd say the worst has got to be either Ada or Brain**** (will it censor that?) (look up the history of what Brain**** was originally going to be called!)

[davidjam]

Does anyone know whatever happened to PASCAL?

I learned some Pascal in computer science class (almost 20 years ago now). Picked up a free Pascal book at the library the other day copyright 1980, started reading it, really quite a historical piece on programming at the time...

Then I noticed upstairs (in the library) a 2000 book on Pascal. I coudn't believe it! I mean where is it being used?

(whilst we vote, how about Lasso?) :rolleyes:

[planetsim]

Talk about bumping a prehistoric thread vaaaska, this has got to be the biggest bump ive seen in sometime. Anyway my vote has to go with QBasic, what did it ever teach anyone? besides poor programming skills.

[LoganK]

Hey! I learned Qbasic a long time ago and I loved it. Although it does tend to create "spaghetti code"...

[Drakla]

Does anyone know whatever happened to PASCAL? It changed its name to Delphi and got gobbled up by Borland and turned into a windows Giu making thing just like C++ Builder. I had to duff my mate in the kidneys 3 times a day to make him move away from the damn horrorshow language as he claimed it was much faster than C++, and "compiles quicker", but it turns out he was just crap at C.

QBasic taught people that monkeys fight by throwing bananas at each other over skyscrapers... don't tell me you never loaded up the demo program. I also had to use it at uni to create a program monitoring infra-red levels from some sensors linked to the serial port and get it to plot graphs. First I thought they were having a laugh, but then later they made us program some wave analysis tripe a BBC Micro and I had to go home and check with my housemates that we were really halfway through the 90s. After that Fortran 77 was a relief, but nothing can top for mind-numbing boredness having to program an exposed circuit board with a 6502a (I think) chip on it, moving the memory address pointer with a bank of 8 switches, pressing a button so the switches now let you enter the op-code, then punching that in.... an hour later you get rewarded with a couple of LEDs simulating the progress of a set of traffic lights.

Mothering hell - this is like some weird regression therapy, perhaps the stabbings will stop now I've let this go.

[LoganK]

...

[Weedpacket]

Ah yes; I see a common thread emerging. Viz., anything to do with BASIC. QBasic because the language should already have been buried by then, and pohopo's nomination (which is my favourite so far), client-side VBScript for web browsers.

[planetsim]

Ah yes; I see a common thread emerging. Viz., anything to do with BASIC. QBasic because the language should already have been buried by then, and pohopo's nomination (which is my favourite so far), client-side VBScript for web browsers.

And here I was thinking that vbscript died, what sites still use it?

Hey! I learned Qbasic a long time ago and I loved it. Although it does tend to create "spaghetti code"...

Well since Qbasic was my first language every so often i still play around with what I know, but only as a joke as I absolutely hated it. Im sure you hate it now :glare:

[Weedpacket]

And here I was thinking that vbscript died, what sites still use it?Well, server side it's what people usually mean when they say "ASP". Client side - I've seen it .... I think they were trying to keep consistent in their choice of language.

[LoganK]

VBScript as client-side is Microsoft's futile attempt to impose standards on others. Keep the Vbscript for ASP if you want, but what's the point at having a language which can do both server-side and client-side?

planetsim - It's not that I hate QBASIC, it's just that I want it not to be alive anymore... It can get frustrating at times (and believe me, back when I was programming with it as my major language it was frustrating), but today I really use it more as you described - a small, fun "joke" hobby to play around with when I get board. Plus it's great for nostalgia! :D

[piersk]

what's the point at having a language which can do both server-side and client-side?

You mean like Java?? :bemused:

[LoganK]

Yes, like Java. I believe that server-side things should be separate from client-side things. Languages like Java and VBscript teach people that there's no difference between server- and client-side, and then you get them posting here with things like "how do i make an alert box with PHP" and "can PHp access and modify the dom dynamically". I've never learned Java, although I had a small stint with it in back in 98. Java itself was confusing to me, and now you have Java Server Pages (jsp) and "servlets" - ???


I like JavaScript though ;)

[planetsim]

how do i make an alert box with PHP yes these people are newbies most of which know very little in html/js/css or any other client matters. These are the people trying to run when they havent yet walked, majority of these people will fall over.

Anyway Java as a client side language (web) isnt exactly thriving, well at the least the number of sites ive seen with Applets have decreased significantly. But I quite like Java i dont see why people are so agaisnt it especially the ones that have never used it.

PHp access and modify the dom dynamically Yes PHP can use DOM believe it or not, most languages that are commonly used today can.

Java itself was confusing to me, and now you have Java Server Pages (jsp) and "servlets
Missed a couple J2ME and J2EE then you also have them Java beans which of course come from J2EE.

Well, server side it's what people usually mean when they say "ASP". Client side - I've seen it .... I think they were trying to keep consistent in their choice of language.
Perhaps I should have said vbscript on the client side was dead or dying a slow painful death.

[LoganK]

how do i make an alert box with PHP


Hey! You make it look like I asked that! :D



yes these people are newbies most of which know very little in html/js/css or any other client matters. These are the people trying to run when they havent yet walked, majority of these people will fall over.

My thoughts exactly...


Anyway Java as a client side language (web) isnt exactly thriving, well at the least the number of sites ive seen with Applets have decreased significantly. But I quite like Java i dont see why people are so agaisnt it especially the ones that have never used it.



PHp access and modify the dom dynamically

Yes PHP can use DOM believe it or not, most languages that are commonly used today can.

I know it can do that through parsing XML documents, but I was giving an example more along the lines where the n00bs think that PHP can find out what's in a text box when you click a link or dynamically change text in a DIV on the client-side. That's what I was getting at - newbs thinking that PHP can do client-side things.





Java itself was confusing to me, and now you have Java Server Pages (jsp) and "servlets


Missed a couple J2ME and J2EE then you also have them Java beans which of course come from J2EE.

See what I mean? Java has got to go. It has *way* too many sub-languages (if they can be called that).





Well, server side it's what people usually mean when they say "ASP". Client side - I've seen it .... I think they were trying to keep consistent in their choice of language.


Perhaps I should have said vbscript on the client side was dead or dying a slow painful death.


I sure hope it is. JavaScript is a lot more efficient than VBscript on the clientside.

[Weedpacket]

Or Javascript?

Or, for that matter, PHP? (No, I haven't found a use for client-side PHP yet.)

[rross46]

Does anyone know whatever happened to PASCAL?

I learned some Pascal in computer science class (almost 20 years ago now). Picked up a free Pascal book at the library the other day copyright 1980, started reading it, really quite a historical piece on programming at the time...

Then I noticed upstairs (in the library) a 2000 book on Pascal. I coudn't believe it! I mean where is it being used?

(whilst we vote, how about Lasso?) :rolleyes:


rofl. I used it in college, apparently its a real good first language. But as far as i know it aint really used for anything else, which makes me question the point of teaching it, if you tried putting stuff you learned in pascal int other languages you would be a bit stuck lol.

I had a look at a java book, and its data structures section and cried.

[leatherback]

rofl. I used it in college, apparently its a real good first language. But as far as i know it aint really used for anything else, which makes me question the point of teaching it, if you tried putting stuff you learned in pascal int other languages you would be a bit stuck lol.

Hm.. Not sure.. Learning how to program is independent of the language. I learned programming on a scrap of paper. Started the computer only on day 4. It is about logic.

<joking.sacasm>
Well. The most useless language would to me be.. HTML. Or.. I remember some discussion about HTML being a very usefull language or something.. Hm.. M<aybe someone can help me remember that ..
</joking.sacasm>

[LoganK]

You may be talking about this:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10247910&highlight=html

And again, in case IE/vBulletin parser screws it up:


http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10247910&highlight=html

[leatherback]

thx logan. Yes. I did mean that.. Was being sarcastic..

[LoganK]

I know you were, I just didn't know if you genuinely wanted the article or not.

[MrZoon]

... or the beliefs of some... Delphi (OO Pascal) is not dead, the company who makes it is just a bit touched. If it was worthless, then why did M$ scarf one of it's main developers to create C# (which has it's good and bad points like any language)? I know hundreds of people who make money every day using Delphi. I co-wrote a Delphi app in the mid-90s that sold tens of thousands of copies, won a bunch of industry awards, and absolutely buried the competition. In retrospect, it could have been coded much more elegantly, but we had a ton of features and marketroids breathing down our necks, and if we had tried to do it in any other language we'd have shot ourselves. Pointless?

Remember Rebol? I have been working in Rebol since it's inception, and know a bunch of other people who use it daily. Not as many as use Delphi, but a fair number. Rebol is twisted, but once you make the leap, it is a beautiful thing. Likewise Rexx (ARexx).. just about anything's possible, you just have to learn the language, define the problem, and code the solution. You can't always depend on somebody to magically produce the packages you need.

Anyone remember HyperScript Tools? It was an OO language for tying together Informix databases and spreadsheets. I wrote a "3D" dungeon game using it in the early 90s. I then tried to do the same thing in Excel using VBA macros. I did it, but it sucked. Which language is more pointless: the one no one uses any more but solved the problem, or the sucky one that's everywhere?

In the early 80s I wrote an Apple II clone of Chase called "TAR". It became so popular at my school that the library folks had me collect all the disks I had handed out because the kids playing it were making too much noise and breaking the keyboards. To the censors, Apple II ML was "pointless" (if they had any idea what was going on at all), but to me, it how I was able to make the game so insane.

If a language lacks features, it needs to be extensible. Some languages like FORTRAN still survive in niches -- you wouldn't want to build web pages with it, but it's still awfully common in scientific circles. Languages that force programmers to do things that are completely ridiculous and/or non-intuitive are bound to fail. Languages produced by committees often suck. Some languages are entrenched just because so much code is written in them, the switching cost ensures their survival (COBOL, for example). Some languages are used by so many people that it makes little economic sense to disregard them, despite their shortcomings.

Good languages make code easier to write, more efficient, more productive, and higher quality. This does not take into account the proficiency of the programmer. A good language can still be hellish for the novice. And "experts" can write crappy code in any language (that's one of the constitutional rights of being an expert, I think).

Languages that had an important role at some point in history may be useless now, but on a cosmic scale, they will never be pointless. And then there's the personal enjoyment factor: I still write some stuff using CanDo, a circa-1986 app-builder for the Amiga. Because I like to. So there ;-)

Are we comparing all languages? Or just www languages? Is the number of supported platforms important? Or is complete control of a single platform worth something? If you personally never solved a complex problem using language X, is it's pointedness somehow reduced? Was the original post a troll? Or is any language pointless if by it's very existence it promulgates interesting discussions?

BTW, I use PHP mostly for my web stuff, but some Rebol and Delphi too. If I had more time and money, it would probably be the other way around.

[Weedpacket]

On a cosmic scale, all existing programming languages are pointless :evilgrin:

[leatherback]

... or the beliefs of some...

DId you really become a member to dig up some old thread, and rant about the usefulness of a crappy programming language? wow.. Dedicated, it sounds like. Anyway.. Before spewing out such a list of issues, perhaps read the sort of things going on in the echo lounge, which is basically a "bar to discuss all, with a focus on the pointlessness, whichever way that is spelled."

:)

[vaaaska]

Anyway.. Before spewing out such a list of issues, perhaps read the sort of things going on in the echo lounge, which is basically a "bar to discuss all, with a focus on the pointlessness, whichever way that is spelled."

leatherback, you're going to scare away the new viewers. We're down on our pledge drive numbers this month and we need all the support we can get. :p

[laserlight]

On a cosmic scale, all existing programming languages are pointless
What about the one used to write the cosmos?

[vaaaska]

<?GOD

GOD = GOD;

?>

[Weedpacket]

Bah, that's an analogue system - it's all implemented in hardware.

[leatherback]

leatherback, you're going to scare away the new viewers. We're down on our pledge drive numbers this month and we need all the support we can get. :p

Oaw, shoot, sorry! Didn't realize that! (Never made it to the inner loop on PhPbuilder).

I'll try to keep my voice down a bit. I guess my dutch directness still hasn't worn down yet. Hm.. oh well, I'll ask for an extention on my contract here, and stay a bit longer in civilized Ozzie land, and learn some manners.

But.. More seriously: It seems like the board is slowing down somewhat. Last year you could not refresh the pages at peak times, and there would be oudles of new posts. Noe it is down to a dripple per day. Is PhP becomming mature, and are there lots of sites? Or...