Slipping into geek mode… bear with me.

Stamped: August 22nd, 2007

Mat Mannion

I have to say, I have a real problem with programming right now. I think most of my anger comes from two things:

Firstly, I read reddit. This would be all fine and fantastic if only all of the stuff that’s annoying and incomprehensible on there went away. I click the RSS feed about once an hour and see what’s near the top; occasionally it’ll be something exciting - a new Javascript library or an awesome movie showing a program that can erase people from image and change the image dimensions whilst maintaining the aspect ratio of its subjects.

Reddit is full of the type of programmers who love to hack things in and write code that only they can read. This probably comes from when they were in school and they passed secret notes in a secret language between themselves and their invisible best friends who lived under their desk. We shall these programmers wankers, and we shall call these secret languages Lisp, or Haskell, or Erlang, or Smalltalk.

Yes, it is possibly the case (at least with Lisp or Haskell) that these are not programming languages at all, they are crazy functional weirdities that use arrows and feel way too much like IBM’s delve into formal with Z. My programs should not look like weird arrows with boxes and big characters that have two diagonal parts for some bizarre reason. However, my biggest gripe isn’t that these languages exist, it’s that people digg reddit up the most unbelievable shite.

Let’s take a typical example from today. Someone posted onto reddit a Haskell implementation of a regular expressions thingamajig from a C book - the C code was 23 lines and the Haskell code was 13 lines.

Who gives a shit? The Haskell code is completely frigging unreadable (this is the fixed version, btw, not the original that didn’t work), is a bundle of arrows and random characters, and doesn’t fucking work! If it did entire regular expressions in 15 lines, then yeah, that’s impressive, but why would I care less? Most importantly, why has this been redditted up to the top of my RSS feed? I hate you guys. Get the fuck out.

More importantly, everyone who is shitting themselves with glee over Python and Ruby and proclaiming it to be the scalable, wonderful language to protect the innocents from the threat of persecution, get out. Python and all it’s many bastard children is a TERRIBLE language, with loose horrible constructs that make me beg and plead to be writing Javascript or PHP instead where at least you can read the code and it makes sense. Any language that promotes the idea that every method which would normally have a void return type should return the object so you can chain 400 fucking methods together to get all your code on one line… GASH OFF.

That is all.

Tomorrow: Why I hate cures for cancer and fluffy kittens

2 Responses

Note that comments are displayed in reverse chronological order with topmost comments being freshest. Comment | Subscribe
  • mat says so:
    August 23rd, 2007 |

    Hmm, that would make PHP a bit ass, but you can do:

    $you->getMother->cantTouchThis(”HAMMERTIME”);

  • Nick says so:
    August 23rd, 2007 |

    Python’s good. You’re just jealous.

    PHP can’t directly call a method on an object returned from a function! Shit!

    getYourMom()->cantTouchThis(”HAMMERTIME”); //NO

Leave a Reply

This is a Trungalow

The Trungalow is a wonderful place where children come to play and frolic around with each other in the relative safety of three men in their early twenties, rather than be on the street smoking crack and playing with their Glocks. By becoming part of the social web 2.0 revolution that is The Trungalow (beta), you are becoming one with the Trungalow itself, a three storey superlative with a heart as big as the sun and a man called Bill who drinks Special Brew and White Lightening on the corner every third Tuesday at 7 in the morning.