Which programming language am I reading?

Sometimes I don't know, either. Some part of my brain takes care of the lower-level details, even to the point of simple semantics, and ‘I’'m just left watching an untrusted input propagate through a program. Perhaps I'm unusual because of the amount of cross-language work I do (I regularly work with 4–7 languages in a day), but I doubt it.

I've seen the opposites, too: students who can't seem to grasp the need for semicolons, despite having seen the same compiler error mere moments before; and people who are totally lost when switching between mainstream languages (“oh, I don't know C++, I only know Java”). I can't blame someone with only C experience failing to read Haskell or Lisp, but I'd expect any competent developer to be able to read, say, Perl, with a little Googling to find out what $_ means. (That doesn't mean they have to like it, of course….)

The comments on that post are entertaining, too.

Posted at 2007-04-20 17:06:14 by Richard • Link to Which programming …