Other Software > Developer's Corner

Why Does Programming Suck?

<< < (2/2)

Edvard:
I am still trying to figure out why Pascal had nested procedure/function definitions.  It was pretty weird to define a function only visible inside the current function/procedure, that you are only going to call one time, in most cases, during the run of the outer procedure/function.  Some kind of Lambda expression would probably have made more sense.
...
-MilesAhead (December 20, 2015, 05:23 PM)
--- End quote ---

Not a problem here, though I consider myself a Pascal tinkerer.  Pascal isn't the only culprit either; Lisp, Javascript, Actionscript, Wolfram, D, MATLAB... even the 'Big Four' scripting languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl) more or less. Yes, things like this can be abused, like nesting to ridiculous levels (which is almost never done unless you're masochistic), or the Funarg problemw, which isn't the end of the world.  There are advantages of nesting as well, like avoiding global variables or namespace pollution.  See Nested_functionw, and this post: Re: Nesting functions- Why?. 
Either way, nested functions in an object-oriented language aren't really needed, and most modern dialects of Pascal (Delphi, Freepascal, GNUPascal) have object capabilities built-in, so the point is a little more moot now. 

Tuxman:
Whether programming sucks completely depends on the language and chosen runtime.

TaoPhoenix:

I'm gonna go with "that could generate more complexity than we could possibly embrace and armed with zero experience..."

Because normally to get that level of explosion of complexity required entire college degrees. (Remember the about six sets of standard high school courses before it "got tough in college"?)

Now we get fantastically complicated discussions every year in Nany! And people making Ludum Dare games by inventing frameworks called TurtleBrains!

 :o

MilesAhead:
To me it's not the programming that sucks but the debugging.  Not necessarily stepping through code but just figuring out what is broken.  My brain feels like a sponge with the fluid violently squeezed out after an hour or so.  But it is tough to let go until you have an idea how to fix it.  :)

TaoPhoenix:
To me it's not the programming that sucks but the debugging.  Not necessarily stepping through code but just figuring out what is broken.  My brain feels like a sponge with the fluid violently squeezed out after an hour or so.  But it is tough to let go until you have an idea how to fix it.  :)

-MilesAhead (December 24, 2015, 04:26 PM)
--- End quote ---

To me it's all like interconnected Dante circles of hell.

Say the first is total despair like the first time you see the Rosetta stone but don't know yourself how to speak *any* of the three old languages!

:o

Then the archaeologist comes to you and says "But the first one is easy!"
:P

So he does the first one for you. Then you start trying to debug the Ancient Egyptian third one and the glyph for "peace in the Kingdom" (maybe some kind of bird with a branch) gets smudged and comes out "Kill them all!"

:D

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page