War of pro-GRAMMING Languages

  Every programmer knows there is one true programming language. A new one every week

If you want to be a thorough-going world traveler, you need to learn 6,912 ways to say "Where is the toilet, please?" That's the number of languages known to be spoken by the peoples of planet Earth, according to Ethnologue.com.

If you want to be the complete polyglot programmer, you also have quite a challenge ahead of you, learning all the ways to say:

printf("hello, world\n") ;

(This one is in C.)
  TERMINATORS
In Algol and Pascal, program statements have to be separated by semicolons. For example, in x:=0; y:=x+1; z:=2 the semicolons tell the compiler where one statement ends and the next begins. C programs are also peppered with semicolons, but in C they are statement terminators, not separators. What's the difference? C needs a semicolon after the last statement, but Pascal doesn't. 

HOW TO COUNT?

Still another perennially contentious issue is how to count. This one brings out the snarling dogmatism in the meekest programmer. Suppose we have a list of three items. Do we number them 1, 2, 3, or should it be 0, 1, 2? Everyone in computerdom knows the answer to that question, and knows it as an eternal truth held with the deepest, visceral conviction. Only one of the alternatives is logically tenable. But which is it? Consider the Java expression Date(2006,1,1); what calendar date do you suppose that specifies?The answer is February 1, 3906. In Java we count months starting with 0, days starting with 1, and years starting with 1,900.

COMMENTS

Even the parts of a program that aren't really part of the program can provoke discord. "Comments" are meant for the human reader and have to be marked in some way so that the computer will ignore them. You might think it would be easy to choose some marker that could be reserved for this purpose in all languages. But a compendium of programming-language syntax compiled by Pascal Rigaux—a marvelous resource, by the way—lists some 39 incompatible ways to designate comments: # in awk,\ in Forth, (*...*) in Pascal, /*...*/ in C, and so on. There's also a running debate over whether comments should be "nestable"—whether it's permissible to have comments inside comments.

  

WELL SAID:

In 1975 Edsger W. Dijkstra, a major figure in the structured-programming movement, wrote a memo titled "How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?" The "truths" were mostly Dijkstra's opinions of programming languages; how he told them was very bluntly. Fortran is "an infantile disorder," PL/I "a fatal disease," APL "a mistake, carried through to perfection." Students exposed to COBOL "are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration," he said. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." When the memo was published a few years later, defenders of COBOL and BASIC replied in kind, although none of them were quite able to match Dijkstra's acid rhetoric.