## brian hayes ### https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-semicolon-wars
everyone wants a new progrmaming language to make it “better” but we haven’t figured out what “good” even is
semi-colons can be statement separators (algol, pascal don’t need a ; after the last statement) or terminators (C does need that last ;)
and then comments: how to write them, can they be nested?
the real criterion in programming languagesis how readily you can express your ideas
imperative languages: do this, do that, they act on stored data, modifying the global state of the system. this used to be the default in early languages (fortran, cobol, algol)
functional languages: based on mathematical functions, wiht always an input and an output (clean in/out)
oop: bind together the commands and the data into encapsulated objects
declarative languages: states facts and relations (used in prolog but also in databases or spreadsheets)
structured programming aka bondage and discipline (e.g. pascal), which has strong typedef and strong controlflow. the reaction against those constraints produced “hacker-friendly” languages, such as C
but exactly: if C has less constraints, how often do we see beautiful C code? is it that hacking something is always going to be somewhat ugly? do we need to work with the constraints of the language in order to write beautiful code?
and then finally there are applications (science, education, etc.)
in classical mathematics, there was also the debate between leibniz’s dx/dt and newton’s x-dot.
python and ruby: scripting languages moving from “glue” scripts to general-purpose languages
the author finds beauty in lisp’s uniformity: data and programs are represented in the same way
When you get to the bottom of it, however, I write programs in Lisp for the same reason I write prose in English—not because it’s the best language, but because it’s the language I know best.