[nomenclature] systems language

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 29/10/2010 21:30, retard wrote:
> Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:54:03 +0100, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>
>> On 14/10/2010 13:30, Justin Johansson wrote:
>>> Touted often around here is the term "systems language".
>>>
>>> May we please discuss a definition to be agreed upon for the usage this
>>> term (at least in this community) and also have some agreed upon
>>> examples of PLs that might also be members of the "set of systems
>>> languages". Given a general subjective term like this, one would have
>>> to suspect that the D PL is not the only member of this set.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Justin Johansson
>>>
>>> PS. my apologies for posting a lame joke recently; certainly it was not
>>> meant to be disparaging towards the D PL and hopefully it was not taken
>>> this way.
>>
>> It's those programming languages whose type systems can be used to move
>> and navigate across water (but can sink if you rock it enough).
>
> It's probably very hard to find an accurate definition for this kind of
> term. The same can be said about terms such as 'functional language'. Many
> 'pragmatic' software engineering terms are based on emotions, broken
> mental models, inaccurate or purposefully wrong information. In my
> opinion these are all subtypes of a thing called 'marketing bullshit'.
>
>
>> Compare
>> to other languages whose type systems merely floats on water, but don't
>> move anywhere... (although some guarantee they will never sink no matter
>> how much you rock it!)
>
> You can easily create a language with guarantees about safety: no
> segfaults, no index out of bounds errors, no overflows etc. Some of these
> languages even guarantee termination. However, they're not Turing
> complete in that case, which reduces their usefulness. Another thing is,
> these guarantees can be expensive. However, the trend has been towards
> higher level languages. One reason is Moore's law, you have achieved the
> same results with a N times slower implementation using the N times
> faster hardware.

Why this serious reply? Perhaps I fell victim to an overly accurate 
analogy, but my previous post was a joke/satire.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer