I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.
IDK, comparing Javascript to English while Java to German seems to either overblow the value of javascript or diminish the value of English.
makes sense though. the definition on english speakers and js devs is accurate, english derived from german and js derived from java.
English is derived from Latin as it was taught by Roman Legionaries, but German has large influences from both Latin and Indo-European languages.
Yeah German isn’t nearly as bad as Java either. Also what is asm? Phoenetic script?
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
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.
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.
“The root of all modern languages” is a heck of a thing to say about Latin, and I’m pretty sure several billion people haven’t quite gotten that memo. Calling a chunk of Europe and a thin slice of Africa “the entire Universe” is also a spicy take. Come for the programmer humor, recoil in disgust for the rampant ethnocentrism, I guess.
I don’t disagree but I would still give the benefit of a doubt that “the whole universe” is such an exaggeration that it makes the overstatement obvious. But it would also be read as a praise. Overall, I wouldn’t take it all to seriously. Made me laugh but I also see the eurocentrism and it’s good to be aware of it.
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.
First, I wouldn’t count the vocative but let’s not get into this debate. Counting cases, Russian wins until you include other balto slavic languages or even Uralic ones.
Fancy is a very subjective term. Auxiliary verbs are fancy in their own way. From an orthographical viewpoint, French is quite fancy with all the silent letters, the way vocals are pronounced and stuff. French had like one spelling “reform” and it was like let’s make it more obvious we decent from Latin. Grammar wise it’s just like the other romance languages from what I know. They once got rid of the silent <s> and put a “gravestone” on the letter before (^) that has no other meaning than here was a silent s. Wouldn’t you call that fancy? Who would call it fancy?
MwaMoi!Meh, as a native Dutch speaker auxiliary verbs feel really utilitarian to me, and not particularly fancy - like you said, that’s highly subjective.
As for cases, I didn’t say Latin or German had the most, but just that I think they’re fancy and that Latin has them while French doesn’t.
So you speak a V2 language like me? I’m German btw. Let me give you an outside perspective on auxiliary verbs in continental western Germanic languages:
The verb comes in second position (hence V2). Using an auxiliary verb moves the content verb to the very end of the sentence. It totally messes with the syntax.
But that’s besides my point. My point wasn’t that French auxiliary verbs are fancy but that fancy can me many things, in French it’s the spelling and pronunciation. Cases aren’t fancy, at least not the German or Latin ones. The slavic cases are a different story, in my objective opinion.
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To be clear, in general the vocative is a case eg in Czech and other balto slavic languages (except eg standard Russian while colloquial Russian is developing a new unrelated one).
In Latin tho, it’s more a relict. Other cases have relicts, too, still I wouldn’t say Latin has the locative.
I would argue that being a relict is a spectrum. Technically, it is a case with many syncretism to nominative, since it is obligatory for those nouns. In the context of LAtiN hAs sOo0 ManY cAsES, it’s not.
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and there are vestiges of a seventh, the Locative.
I called it relicts but it’s basically what I said. Maybe vestiges is the better word in English, in German we say “Relikte”.
Latin has more rules, but they’re more utilitarian than fancy. Latin rules are there to make sure you understand exactly what is being said. French rules are there to make everything elegant and confusing, like high fashion.
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 think the elitism regards of French isn’t about French native speakers but about second language learners. French was the lingua franca in Europe for quite a while and using French loan words makes you sound more fancy and eloquent in many languages (compare “adult” with “grownup” which is a Latin loan word but I can’t think of a real example so I hope no one will notice).
The Russian bit I totally agree. Esperanto vs python is quite a leap, I agree. Showing a list (that’s probably not conclusive but still) is telling when compared to the go to beginners programming language. Still there are parallels in the design and intention. No comparison is ever perfect.
All in all it’s not perfect but as a joke, it works for me. Sure, it’s not unbiased but if not taken too seriously, I can laugh about it, and I can over analyze it for fun so win win for me.
It’s kinda funny, I’m Flemish and a lot of French loan words (ambriage, merci, nondedju = nom de dieu to name a few) are mainly used in dialect, and therefore don’t make you sounds sophisticated or worldly at all.
From what I know it’s similar in Swiss German (with words like merci and velo (bike)). I don’t know about Fleming but Swiss embraces their dialects so it isn’t stigmatized either
Heh, we use velo as well. And yeah, we don’t really stigmatise dialects that much either, though depending on how much dialect you use people might find it unprofessional.
Yeah, but that’s my point. The author clearly isn’t thinking about the hundreds of millions of native French speakers around the world, they’re an American thinking the word “mutton” sounds fancier than “sheep”… in English.
Which yeah, okay, that’s their cultural upbringing causing that, but then maybe don’t make a joke entirely predicated on making sharp observations about how languages work and aimed specifically at nerds. I can only ever go “it’s funny because it’s true” or be extremely judgmental of your incorrect assumptions about how languages work here.
your incorrect assumptions
Why make it about me? I was more or less playing devil’s advocate, saying if not taken seriously it’s funny.
I would be more likely to agree with you if you put “OP’s assumption”. Your phrasing makes me want to double down on my original position.
That’s just a general recommendation for discussions in general, online and offline. I learned a thing or two about my biases and perspectives here. Btw I’m German and that part resonated with me from my little experience with JAVA and my experience in learning about my native language and teaching it to others.
Oh, sorry, you misunderstood, I didn’t mean you specifically, I mean you as in “why would you ever do this”, as in “why would anybody ever do this”.
Languages, as we’ve established, are complicated.
About Esperanto, since it’s not a national language (intentionally so) it’s hard to do a census of speakers.
Also, to what level is considered “speaking Esperanto”? Taking the Duolingo course? Having it as a “mother tongue” where both parents speak it in a household in order to communicate? These are both probably countable, and produce wildly different numbers.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think that’s the reason. I also think those numbers may be different but they may both be indistinguishable from zero when plotted against natural languages. You’re right about it being hard to define what counts as a “Esperanto speaker”. I can’t decide if that makes the Python comparison better or worse, though.
Yeah, I do not think Python is a very good comparison.
I was thinking more like Clojure:
- Enthusiastic and friendly geeks trying to push their language on the world trying to make it a better place. They are both definitely not a little cultish!
- Language intended to be simple to learn with a limited and regular vocabulary, but can handle complicated work with ease.
- They both say that learning their language will make your mind better able to do other languages.
- A bridge between languages. Vanilla Clojure runs on the JVM and can invoke Java commands. But it has also been built on other platforms like JavaScript (ClojureScript), .NET (CLR), Python (Basilisp), BASH (Babashka), and others I think.
- The parts of both languages can be broken up, mixed, and matched, and used for other parts. In Esperanto, the fundamental elements can be broken down and made into other words. In Clojure, you’ve got functions and lists - and higher order functions that work on functions and lists, and lists of functions, and functions of lists.
- Did I mention: Friendly & welcoming geeks that lo-o-o-ove newbies! Seriously, both Clojure nerds and Esperanto nerds are unnaturally nice and would like to welcome you to the club. They’ve got tons of free resources for you to learn it.
Honestly, I think both are right. Both are simple languages that expand your way of thinking, and are probably both worth learning, if you’re into that sort of thing.
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.
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.
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
Hm?
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
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/
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.
thanks, i hate it
LISP is too old to care any more.
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
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.
If you think Rust has zero rough edges you might have drunk too much kool aid.
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.
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.
technically correct, the best kind of correct
I finally found the real reason why I like java: I‘m german
Have you ever tried kotlin?
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.
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
вообще мимо
Please help, я это не понимаю.
Basically translates to “despite me liking English, js is not my cup of tea”. “Вообще мимо” can also be more literally translated as “a complete miss”, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s used that way
Ah! That makes sense. I wasn’t expecting мимо to act like a noun in this way. Большое спасибо.
Yeah, I think it’s a beautiful and expressive language. I also do like Java, though.
Swabian here. I like C#. Guess that fits.
I’m also German, and our beautiful language being compared to java feels like an insult to me.
Strength in diversity, I guess
That’s the reason I’m deeply offended. I’m german too. 😉
It fits, English and JavaScript are both three languages in a trench coat.
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.
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.
I was going to say toki pona is not quite brainfuck but at least somewhere in that direction, with its tiny vocab
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)
Clojure, a simple grammar but most of the vocabulary is imported from another language.
APL
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.
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
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Forth
Rust is esperanto because its only actually used by a small group of nerds,
python is russian because everything made in it is unreliable.
Haskell is Esperanto. The difference being that Rust is actually catching on.
Rust is used more Ethan you think
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.
Can anyone actually tell what exactly complicated in Java? Verbose, maybe it was at some point but I find it very straightforward and easy.
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.
i still don’t understand. is it easier in python or JS to make getters and setters? with python my experience has been the opposite, with the decorator based solution in mind.
or if the problem is that they exist, as an option to be used, why is that a problem? they can be implemented in any other language, and it can be useful.then yeah, you should check for nulls. just like for None’s in python, or if you have the correct type at all, because if it’s entirely different but ends up having a function or variable with the same name then who knows what happens.
then in javascript besides null, you also have undefined and NaN!It’s not easier to do getters or setters but especially in python there’s a big culture of just not having getters or setters and accessing object variables directly. Which makes code bases smaller.
Same with the types (although most languages for instance doesn’t consider None a valid value for an int type) Javascript has sooo many dynamic options, but I don’t see people checking much.
I think it boils down to, java has a lot of ceremony, which is designed to improve stability. I think this makes code bases more complex, and gives it the reputation it has.
I think it boils down to, java has a lot of ceremony, which is designed to improve stability. I think this makes code bases more complex, and gives it the reputation it has.
I’m not a java programmer, but I like it more because python and js projects are often very messy
Yeah, that’s my experience too. I think once projects get to a certain size, you really reap the benefits of strong opinions, regardless if what those opinions are.
i still don’t understand. is it easier in python or JS to make getters and setters? with python my experience has been the opposite, with the decorator based solution in mind.
or if the problem is that they exist, as an option to be used, why is that a problem? they can be implemented in any other language, and it can be useful.then yeah, you should check for nulls. just like for None’s in python, or if you have the correct type at all, because if it’s entirely different but ends up having a function or variable with the same name then who knows what happens.
then in javascript besides null, you also have undefined and NaN!
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 (
FileReaderand thenBufferedReader) just to get an object that has areadLine()method. Why? Can’tBufferedReadertake a file name on its own and work it out? OrFileReaderjust providesreadLine()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.
Library built this way because it supposed to be flexible and provide ground for complex usecases.
It’s definitely that, and not the fact that it was written in the first half of the nineties when everyone and their mother was all in on OOP/OOD to the detriment of usability.
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?
You’re just describing the problem. Yes, I see where they’re going with this. It’s still a usability nightmare. I can’t think of another language that makes you jump through hoops like this on IO, and they get along fine without it.
I agree with you. It’s a neat design idea to make things a bit more maintainable perhaps, but it’s just annoying to program with.
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.
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
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.
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
Assembly is like phonetic script.
section .data msg1 db "Those copper ingots were of terrible quality.",0 msg2 db "My servant was also treated very badly!",0
No, jokes are fun.
The whole (Mediterranean) universe.
I’m pretty sure these alphabets cover almost the entire globe
East Asia and it’s Chinese-derived alphabets being the big exception. The New World would be too, if it weren’t for barbarians in upturned helmets burning all the codices. I suppose Canada’s North is pretty dependent on indigenous syllabics, which were invented whole-cloth in the modern era.
I was referring to the Latin as per OP, though. And even then “used to” is doing a lot of the work, thanks to the Islamic empire conquering the Middle East and North Africa and converting it to Arabic. And maybe Greek prevailing in the East, but I’m guessing it would be hard to put an end date on Latin in the Byzantine empire.
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
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
It’s a cool meme but I have many many disagreements.
