The Semicolon Wars


The Semicolon Wars was an interesting article to read, it opened my vision to see how many programming languages are out there and reminded me the little I know about them. One of the things that surprised the most was the launch per week of a new programming language and how they are interconnected, it is estimated that they're more programming languages than languages spoken around the globe. It mentioned the four different types of programming languages that exist, imperative, functional, object-oriented and finally declarative.

Until recently I only had programmed with imperative and object-oriented. I've been immersed a few weeks ago to functional with Clojure, that's based on Lisp. So far I have grasped the idea of a functional language, in the article, it explained it like functional languages are like a black box, you introduce arguments as input and returns values as output. These operations merely depend on the input and there is no such thing like an outside force that can alter them.

The discussion of which language is better than the other, over the years has been very subjective rather than being objective. It's like your favourite team you see it with love eyes and no other team will fill you like it. I know there are languages better than others, depending on the situation, you can find low-level or high-level, but it depends on the problem you want to attack, and you need to find the best it suits for you and the situation.

I agree with Brian when it says that he writes poetry in English not because it's the best language, but because it is the language he knows the best, being the same thing with the programming language he thinks it's the best. It's going to be arduous to find the language you feel comfortable with only because there is a new language every week. Once you find it, you can enter into the discussion about which programming language it's the best or maybe you agree with me and you can give your objective doxa about them.


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