[nomenclature] systems language

[retard]

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.