Languages

I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.
- As someone with a background in linguistics, my jimmies are indeed rustled.
  
  Does Russian have stricter grammar syntax than German? I was a bit puzzled by the comparison made above
- IDK, comparing Javascript to English while Java to German seems to either overblow the value of javascript or diminish the value of English.
  
  Yeah German isn't nearly as bad as Java either. Also what is asm? Phoenetic script?
  
  makes sense though. the definition on english speakers and js devs is accurate, english derived from german and js derived from java.
- How so? Except the first sentence which is obviously not serious, I would agree with all linguistic statements or at least not disagree with any.
  
  For one, Latin has more fancy rules than French. I guess the subjunctive is probably something English speakers might consider fancy, but Latin has that too. Latin has more times that are conjugations of the core verb (rather than needing auxiliary verbs), has grammatical cases (like German, but two more if you include vocative) and, idk, also just feels fancier in general.
  I’ll admit it’s been years since I actually read any Latin and that I only have a surface level understanding of all languages mentioned except for French, but this post reads like it’s about the stereotypes of the countries rather than being about the languages themselves.
  
  I think the first sentence is probably enough to make anyone not afflicted with a eurocentric brain want to palm some face.
  I think excusing it as a "not serious" statement is dangerous, as a lot of people even on Lemmy won't second guess it.
  The belief that the west is the origin of all science and culture is surprisingly pervasive, especially in the tech industry.
  
  I mean, French is vulgar Latin at best. And even if it wasn't obviously spoken by all sorts of French people, elites or not, it's also the official language of a bunch of other countries, from Monaco to Niger. "Elites and certain circles" is a very weird read, which I'm guessing is based on US stereotypes on the French? I don't even think the British would commit to associating the French with elitism.
  Russian speakers being "mostly autoritarian left" is also... kind of a lot to assume? I'm not even getting into that one further. I don't know if the Esperanto one checks out, either. "Esperanto speaker" is the type of group, and this is true, whose wikipedia page doesn't include statistics but instead just a list of names. Which is hilarious, but maybe not a great Python analogue. It may still be the best pairing there, because to my knowledge English speakers aren't any worse at speaking English than the speakers of any other language. They are more monolingual, though.
  It just all sounds extremely anglocentric to me, which is what it is, I suppose, but it really messes with the joke if you're joking about languages specifically. One could do better with this concept, I think.

I suspect there’s more people who speak Python fluently than Esperanto. So that comparison sits very wrong with me. The rest was funny :)
- Esperanto always struck me as more perl-like with each part of speech having its own suffix like perl has $ for scalars, @ for arrays, and % for hashes. Though perl is probably more like a bunch of pidgins...
  
  Yeah, I was about to say.
  Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.
  PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.
  Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.
- Esperanto's equivalent would probably be Haskell.
  Python is probably more like Spanish. Very easy basics, but then people from different regions of where it's has spread out barely understand each other
- It's probably a similar learning speed
- Nobody mentioned number of speakers though
  
  No, but the adoption rate is likely related to how useful the language is?

Is this post sane-washing Russia? What’s left about Russia under Putin? Overall funny, though
- It's a post by the lemmy dev, so yeah that's a given
- The USSR was bad but it wasn't communist. For that it would have had to have been stateless and classless, definitionally.

the root of all modern languages
the whole universe used to speak it
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
P.S: the closest thing to that is Egyptian, but not the language, the Alphabet (the Symbols, not a literal alphabet). Tons of alphabets are descended from Egyptian, including, but not limited to: Greek (and by Proxy Latin, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Armenian and Armenian (I just noticed this, I'm leaving it in because it's funny)), Arabic (and by proxy- I won't list all that), Hebrew, and Aramaic (and by proxy all Indian languages but one, as well as Tibetan, Phags-pa mongol (and by proxy exactly 5 letters of Hangul), Thai, Lao, Sundanese, and Javanese). There's a lot of dead languages that used scripts derived from Egyptian too but I didn't mention them because I'd be here all day listing stuff like Sogdian or Norse Runes.
- BASIC: Am I a joke to you?
  
  Ahem… Assembly is tired of being forgotten
  
  No, jokes are fun.
- Phoenician wants a word.
  
  Also descended from Egyptian. Forgot to add them though. They're the link between Egyptian and Greek. and Egyptian and Aramaic
- The whole (Mediterranean) universe.
  
  I'm pretty sure these alphabets cover almost the entire globe

Why is everyone down on Rust? Seriously. I don't know it but I've considered learning it and it appeals to me and people literally scoff when I mention it. Saw it referred to as a meme language on Lemmy, which is built in Rust. What am I missing?
- Butthurt C devs don't want it replacing their language.
  
  as guy who likes c: think rust is a good and cool idea
- I think rust has good ideas and may even become the default systems language in the mid-term. I find it irritating that there is a very vocal subset of rust proponents that tend to insist that every project in every language needs to be rewritten in rust immediately. I suspect that is also why other people are down on rust.
  
  That makes sense! Thanks for your insight
- I think ppl just got pissed with the fanboys unironically asking to RIIR everything. The language itself is comfy AF, tho
- Imo it's bc it's the new kid on the block. Yes it's 10 years old but barely becoming common use in production and government mandates are only speeding that up. In actuality it's a great language and has been hyped for a few years by people who actually use it. Python went through the same thing in the 2010s where devs really tried clowning on it, now it's used everywhere.
  
  Good to know, I've only been a dev since 2019 so I appreciate the long view
- I don't think many ppl are down on rust... it's won developer's most favorite to use for like 5+ years now in a row on stackoverflow.
- For me "The Critical Flaw" of rust is its compiler. And requirent of 12 GB of disk space to compile just the frontend of compiler. Even GCC will all frontends(C, C++, Ada, Fortran, Modula-2, JIT) requires less space.
  But joke is probably about "rewrite in rust" culture.
  
  Wow that's enormous. I'll have to learn more about that. Thanks for the info!
  
  Maybe someone ought to rewrite rust in C.
  
  that's because Rust is more modern and in modern days we don't rly have hard disk limitation, also it's probably because the compiler tells you the solution to most problems
- i think it’s mainly people being cranky and set in their ways. they got used to working around all the footguns/bad design decisions of the C/C++ specifications and really don’t want to feel like it was all for nothing. they’re comfortable with C/C++, and rust is new and uncomfortable. i think for some people, being a C/C++ developer is also a big part of their identity, and it might be uncomfortable to let that go.
  i also think there’s a historical precedent for this kind of thing: when a new way of doing things emerges, many of the people who grew up doing it the old way get upset about it and refuse to accept that the new way might be an improvement.
  
  Some rust proponents having this attitude is probably part of the problem.
  
  Is Rust as close to the metal as C? Seems like there would still be a need for C. I could see Rust replacing Java as something that's so ceremonial and verbose, but from my limited perspective as a sometimes java dev, having only the most glancing experience with C, it seems like C would be hard to replace because of what it is. Buy I honestly don't know much about Rust either, I just think JS is so finicky and unpredictable whereas web assembly seems extremely fast and stable.
- Cause it’s a C++ replacement when said audience never asked for one. It’s great but it’s still waaaayy too early, people need to slowly get comfortable with it.
- It's like a good C++ that is actually able to replace it. There are lots of places where a good C++ is useful. Like everything that needs low latency and low resource usage.
  But it's not an easy language, so (I'm guessing) people who see everyone loving it but are unable to learn it start to suffer some sort of cognitive dissonance. If it's too difficult for me to learn, that must be its fault, not mine.

I finally found the real reason why I like java: I‘m german
- I don't get why I don't like Rust then
  
  You will, comrade.
  
  Do you like Russian, tho? Some Russians I've encountered did find it overcomplicated at times... Но в целом понимаю: мне норм заходит энглиш, а жабаскрипт вообще мимо
- I also love Java, especially all the goodies added in 17. I'm not German though... 🤔
  
  Maybe you‘d have fun learning german then ;)
  
  You are now. Herzlichen Glückwunsch.
- Have you ever tried kotlin?
- Swabian here. I like C#. Guess that fits.
- That's the reason I'm deeply offended. I'm german too. 😉
- I'm also German, and our beautiful language being compared to java feels like an insult to me.
  Strength in diversity, I guess

PHP is Russian. Used to be huge, caused lots of problems, now slowly dwindling away. Its supporters keep saying how it's still better than the competition.
- True, but only because it actually is. Except weirdos who saw php code 20 years ago say it sucks.

In Soviet Russia memory manages you!

I can confidently tell you that no one who actually knows Latin would ever say French is "Latin with fancy rules."
- ..which ironically makes for a perfect parallel with "C/C++"
- C++ is pig latin
- I just have some high school Latin from long ago, but if you parse "fancy" as "ornamental at the expense of utility", then I think it's a fair description.
  
  That's a good point. I parsed "fancy" as "more intricate" and was immediately affronted ;) I like your take on it.
  
  Btw, your username just gave me a good belly laugh

It's a cool meme but I have many many disagreements.

As a python developer, I'll accept the shower joke in stride. But who are these Esperanto speakers you're shitting on?
- It's just Shatner, isn't it? Except even he doesn't really speak it even though he was in a movie that was entirely Esperanto.

It fits, English and JavaScript are both three languages in a trench coat.

I guess assembler is sumerien then, only still written and understood? And cobol or fortran? Linear a and b?
- FORTRAN: Proto-Indo-European COBOL: Proto-Sino-Tibetic
  Assembly: neuron signals
- Assembly is ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs.

Well latin isn't the root of all modern languages
- Yes, but "Proto Indo-European" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. /s
  
  It isn't even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.
  Source I am from Austria. :)
  
  Exactly. Nobody knows how the tongue was involved in h₂.
  
  Dravidian?

Perl is... forgotten entirely, despite its efforts in getting us from there to here.
Yup, checks out.
PHP also, but good riddance:-D.
Shell scripting is the ink that makes up these words - without them, you would never have seen this image.
- I think Perl is closer to Esperanto - the vast majority of people will never want to learn it and the people that know it won't stfu about how everyone should use it! And they could all use a shower!
  (I kid... Mostly)
  
  As a Perl user who won't shut up about it... Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty fair.
  
  No, that's perfect
  
  Plus it has markers for variable types just like Esperanto has suffixes for parts of speech. Wall was a linguist, after all.
  
  You... you shut up! Excuse me, I have to go take a shower:-) (/s)
  Anyway you're right (no /s) - at one point it filled in a gap between the likes of C++ and Assembly on the one hand and shell scripting (bash, awk, grep, sed, each with its own syntax and very little of that shared in common with one another) and I guess Fortran on the other. I still prefer it enormously to everything else - it's quirky but fun:-) - though I get why a less experienced person should choose Python and stick with it, even as we all wish that there was another alternative that would work better than either.
  And since I can't resist: Perl is 8-20x faster than Python, and major websites like DuckDuckGo and booking.com use it. Sigh....I guess it's time for that shower now:-).

But people like and appreciate German.
- Yeah, I enjoyed learning German... Java on the other hand....

Java, verbose? laughs in Pascal
Python being Esperanto? Yeah, no, because Python is actually being used

I want to disagree on German. It isn't verbose. We've got several words where there isn't an equivalent in pretty much any other languages. Including Schadenfreude und Torschlusspanik (the feeling that you are getting older l, can't find a partner and will die alone).
The same EU legal text has in German 22.118 words Vs English 24.698.
The making me cry part, that's fair. Overcomplicated, could be worse.
- The same EU legal text has in German 22.118 words Vs English 24.698.
  That needs a character count really. Words isn't a particularly relevant measure when the language uses compound words
- I think word count is not the best metric precisely because of what you mention. "Krankenversicherungskarte" is one word vs the three word "health insurance card", but they convey the same information in roughly the same amount of characters.
  Overall I don't find German particularly verbose, only sometimes a small phrase is condensed into a single word.
  
  Hm?
  
  I don’t know german but it seems to be more logical to have one word for “health insurance card” since it describes one class of objects. Better than spelling 3 nouns where one partially describes what object is and other nouns act like clarification
- Java class names look like German compound nouns though
  
  That's bullshit, we don't do camel case!
- I wonder what the best programming analogue is for combining words into one where other languages keep them separate; maybe the functional-style chains of adapters?
- My favorite German words are verschlimmbessern and Backpfeifengesicht.
  Here is a list with explanation and more examples:
  https://callinggermanyhome.com/cool-german-words/

Rust is esperanto because its only actually used by a small group of nerds,
python is russian because everything made in it is unreliable.
- Python is Spanish; a ton of people learned a bit in school and never picked it back up again. Places that speak it natively all have their own conventions because, even though the native languages were replaced by colonizers, a lot of the native languages patterns remained in place. Most places that speak it are super welcoming and stoked that you're trying to learn.
- Haskell is Esperanto. The difference being that Rust is actually catching on.
- Rust is used more Ethan you think

Rust is more like Esperanto isn’t it? It’s Latin, but regularized and with the rough edges sanded off.
Python is more like Spanish. A billion speakers in the world, and really easy to pick up a few phrases, but a small European minority still think they run it.
- Esperanto is just Spanish pretending to be a neutral language.
  Honestly a very bad language. Nothing intuitive or easy about it. It's as well thought out as QWERTY.
- If you think Rust has zero rough edges you might have drunk too much kool aid.

Out of curuosity, what is the programming equivalent of Japanese?
- I was tempted to say Ruby, but based on my friends that are learning (or tried to learn Japanese), it seems like Ruby is trying to be the opposite. So not sure.
  Ruby would maybe fit with toki pona : terse, simple, predictable.
  
  Ruby is literally Japanese. It was invented there. Plus a Danish guy popularized it outside of Japan. Like how weebs spurred interest in Japan and the Japanese language outside Japan.
  
  as someone with some knowledge of japanese, japanese is extraordinarily terse, simple, and predictable. anyone who's seen some anime should be familiar with this - there's an incredible number of set phrases that carry a conversation in a precise way (that minimizes surprise)
  
  I was going to say toki pona is not quite brainfuck but at least somewhere in that direction, with its tiny vocab
- Clojure, a simple grammar but most of the vocabulary is imported from another language.
- APL
- Forth
- Can't imagine there is any. You need to learn three scripts to read Japanese fluently IINM. Katagana, Hirigana and something else... Probably someone who speaks Japanese can say.
  Anti Commercial-AI license
  
  The something else is called kanji, and are very complicated characters stolen from China with many meanings and pronunciation. Learning Japanese is very 楽しい (it is really)
  
  just as a point of contention, english also has two character sets (compare A and a), and english doesn't even do anything with that, the capital letters exist for purely frustrating reasons

Hearing about Esperanto the first time. Hate itwhen someone copies my idea and does it in 1887

Гарантийный без ошибки памятей!
I unironically think it would be hilarious to write a borrow-checked version of Адрес. (The Soviet version of C - or rather C is a version of it, given that Адрес was first compiled in '55)
- Didn't even know it
  
  Not surprised. The Russian Wikipedia page on it is just a stub. The English one is actually longer.
  I can't find any online introductions to it or compilers for it either, in English or написал по-Русски. Or Ukrainian for that matter, assuming I'd know it if I see it, although the Wikipedia page is longer.

Rust is more like Lojban. Its adherents are just as excited to tell you about it and it too was created to fix all those pesky problems from people using their language imprecisely.

This is highly inaccurate:
D: Esperanto. Highly derivative of C (Latin), designed by people previously writing compilers. It's not being taken seriously as such.
Russian is nowadays being speaken by right-wing authoritarians instead, and any programmer that is auth-right is either coding in C/C++, or a Javascript/Python dev pretending to be a C/C++ dev to "gatekeep" nulangs (sic).

Can anyone actually tell what exactly complicated in Java? Verbose, maybe it was at some point but I find it very straightforward and easy.
- Its standard library reads like someone's Object Oriented Programming 101 final project, and they probably got a B- for it. Everything works and follows OO principles, but they didn't stop to think about how it's actually going to be used.
  Let's try to read a file line-by-line:
  
  BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("sample.txt")); String line = reader.readLine();
  We're having to instantiate two objects (FileReader and then BufferedReader) just to get an object that has a readLine() method. Why? Can't BufferedReader take a file name on its own and work it out? Or FileReader just provides readLine() itself?
  Not only that, but being parsimonious with what we import would result in:
  
  import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.FileReader;
  But we're much more likely to be lazy and import everything with import java.io.*;. Which is sloppy, but I understand.
  I can see what they were thinking when separating these concerns, but it resulted in more complexity than necessary.
  There's a concept of "Huffman Coding" in language design. The term itself comes from data compression, but it can be generalized to mean that things you do often in a programming language should be short and easy. The above is not good Huffman Coding.
  
  Library built this way because it supposed to be flexible and provide ground for complex usecases. It can only be flexible if your API works with simple abstractions which you can then compose. It’s not driven by “I need this specific utility for this specific scenario”. That would be zoo you have in JS where you have 10 ways to iterate over array and 9 of them wrong for your scenario.
  Java’s OO is great because they design library with SRP in mind making sure there is few but good ways to do things.
  BufferedReader cannot accept file name because it makes arbitrary reader… well buffered. It’s not BufferedFileReader, even that would accept something like Path or File, not string, because File can be remote file, should Reader now know all possible local and remote protocols and path formats? What else it must do?
  Having it designed the way it is, allows Java to have utilities for various scenarios. Your scenario covered by standard lib too. See Files.readAllLines which, surprise-surprise, built on top of BufferedReader.
- I think a lot of it is "ceremony", so it's pretty common in java to:
  create a get method for every object variable
  create a set method for every object variable
  Then add on top that you have the increased code of type annotations PLUS the increased code of having to check if a value is null all the time because all types are nullable.
  None of that is hugely complicated compared to sone of the concepts in say Rust, but it does lead to a codebase with a lot more lines of code than you'd see in other similar languages.
  
  Before someone says it, I know a lot of this stuff doesn't need to be done. I'm just giving it as examples for why Java has the rep it does.
- Java itself is kind of blissful in how restricted and straightforward it is.
  Java programs, however, tend to be very large and sprawling code-bases built on even bigger mountains of shared libraries. This is a product of the language's simplicity, the design decisions present in the standard library, and how the Java community chooses to solve problems as a group (e.g. "dependency injection"). This presents a big learning challenge to people encountering Java projects on the job: there's a huge amount of stuff to take in. Were Java a spoken language it would be as if everyone talked in a highly formal and elaborate prose all the time.
  People tend to conflate these two learning tasks (language vs practice), lumping it all together as "Java is complicated."
  $0.02: Java is the only technology stack where I have encountered a logging plugin designed to filter out common libraries in stack traces. The call depth on J2EE architecture is so incredibly deep at times, this is almost essential to make sense of errors in any reasonable amount of time. JavaScript, Python, PHP, Go, Rust, ASP, C++, C#, every other language and framework I have used professionally has had a much shallower call stack by comparison. IMO, this is a direct consequence of the sheer volume of code present in professional Java solutions, and the complexity that Java engineers must learn to handle.
  Some articles showing the knock-on effects of this phenomenon:
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11865307/how-to-expand-size-of-java-stack-trace-to-see-bottom-of-stack-triggering-a-sta
  https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/16g30jx/can_java_errors_stack_traces_be_longer/
  https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Java-Spring-Framework-produce-gigantic-unreadable-stack-traces
  https://community.splunk.com/t5/Splunk-Dev/What-are-the-best-extraction-methods-for-Java-Stacktrace-Errors/m-p/380397
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65436457/springboot-stack-trace-logging-filter-only-from-my-packages
- Char count for same functionality is still at least double in java vs python. It just feels like a chore to me. jetbrains helped, but still python is just so light
  
  Char count is poor complexity metric. Perl is better than Python with your logic as it is more condensed.

Ackshully, Clojure is Esperanto, and I will not be taking questions at this time.
- I miss writing in clojure. I never have a reason to write in a functional language at work

Heeeey!!
^^^(snifs ^^^armprit)
...
Fuck....

There's nothing left from Russia anymore.
- the thing with russian is that it's not spoken only by russians. Russian-speaking part of the internet is quite large actually.
- There's still some Russia left. But hopefully Ukraine will change that soon :)

Argh, politics in IT.

Surprised nobody has complained so far about the Rust comparison. I guess any objection would appear to prove the point, or at least reinforce the "evangelist" stereotype.
- I think you answered your own question :)
  
  To be pedantic, I didn't ask a question, I just said I was surprised! I am still surprised.

Assembly is Turk, started everything.
- Assembly is proto-indo-european

RustyRooster: C is the root of all modern languages
FORTRAN: Am I a joke to you?
- No grandpa fortran, everybody loves you. Now let's get you back inside with cobol.
  
  https://github.com/cloudflare/cobweb
- Fortran is Proto-Indo-Germanic or whatever it's called again
  
  Lisp (specifically IPL) is Proto-Indo-European. All languages have unwittingly taken inspiration from it
- LISP is too old to care any more.

This is great.
If I could make one change, there's so many funnier languages that could have been Esperanto. I would have taken a shameless jab at F#, myself.

I write several flavours of BASIC fluently, Fortran and Pascal passably, three forms of assembler well enough to get by, and I've worked in COBOL.

according to larry wall perl is the looney tunes theme song
- Baroque? Because he does actually say that.

APL is Ithkuil.

oddly enough those also correspond approximately to how well I (native German speaker) know each of these languages; but why is there a stereotype that us Python devs and Esperantists need to shower more? :(

soo...is FORTRAN greek? Or phoenecian?

i'm in this photo and i don't like it

Python malfeliĉas min.
- Mi pensas ke, vi volis tajpi, "Python (aŭ Pitono) malfeliĉigas min."
  Mal : Opposite
  Feliĉ- : Happy
  Ig : Makes (Transitive verb)
  As : Present tense.
  "Mi malfeliĉas." : I'm sad.
  "Pitono malfeliĉigas ĉiujn." (Python makes everyone sad.)
- Kia domaĝo. La unua programlingvo kiun mi lernis estis Python. Ĝi multe helpis min kompreni programadon kaj lerni aliajn programlingvojn. Simile estas kun Esperanto. Ĝi helpis min lerni la francan kaj faciligis la lernadon de alia gramatikaĵo.
  Ho, kaj mi ankoraŭ povas paroli Esperanton.

basic is like toki pona then i guess, like python but even easeier
no wait, that ones gray snail (minimalist vocabulary: it has only 4 commands)

What about basic and assembly? Even Pascal?
Yeah I've not done any coding in a while.

What would be the equivalent of Scratch?
What about VBA?

Literally all of these languages are rooted in English.
C: printf()
C++: cout
JavaScript: document.write() or window.print()
Java: system.out.println()
Python: print()
Rust: print()
Exactly zero of those reference a language other than English. I'm not even a linguist and this is just silly. It's literally part of why English is becoming the dominant world language, because if you learn computer programming you basically have to learn English.
- Humor comes fast to you, but you're obviously faster.
  
  Damn!
  
  I mean, that's fair. I get it, I just don't really find it very funny.
- Whoosh!
  Have an sympathy upvote.
- This is the programming humor community. Emphasis on the humor part.