My personal quest for the perfect programming language
(a short presentation)

---

The presentation:

My Perfect Language Quest (22 light slides, in pdf)

The demo (working code):

demo.R (R source code, small text file)

     To run this code, save as 'demo.R' and type:

           source('demo.R')

     from within R, in the same directory where you saved it.
     It is assumed you have R installed.      you may get R from http://r-project.org/

Overview:

This is a short presentation I made about a personal quest for my perfect programming language.

Obviously this is a personal view. Different people tend to prefer different languages. Religious arguments abound about whether dynamic typing is superior to static typing, whether pure-functional languages are more elegant than object oriented procedural ones, and on and on.

My personal preference is towards expressiveness, programmer's productivity, and minimum 'fluff' (aka boilerplate). This preference has to be balanced: APL is too terse and cryptic for my taste, LISP is beautiful and very regular, but I'd trade some parentheses and word verbiage any day for a richer syntax and larger operator space.

The presentation is deliberately short. I could write a much longer and detailed one. The point is not to teach all the virtues of the presented languages. It is only to focus of the aspect I feel matters the most, and to keep the message short.

Before I get flamed: I know that I could make some examples better, shorter, more general. I know that Java today is not the same Java of 10 years ago. The intention is not to berate certain languages but to demonstrate boilerplate vs expressiveness contrasts and why they are important.

Rosetta code is an excellent language comparison resource.

---

Feel free to email comments to:

---