There are a couple of things we have learnt in our collective 50+ years of software engineering:
1. Code is not English: Nice try COBOL, and someone had to try, but a failed experiment. Bizarre holdouts: SQL
2. People are not idiots, and will not collapse into a gibbering heap if their programming language insists that 0 and "0" are different things and must be managed accordingly. Bizarre holdouts: PHP, Javascript. Honourable mention: Excel (no Excel, that is not a f&@cking date, I will tell you if I want a date).
> 2. People are not idiots, and will not collapse into a gibbering heap if their programming language insists that 0 and "0" are different things and must be managed accordingly.
This. People are not idiots, they're learning. By making your language assume programmer is an idiot you're making it more difficult for said programmer to form a coherent mental model of what's going on.
I think SQL is actually one of the better implementations of this idea. It's a bit verbose, but I don't think it's tripped up people in the same way that PHP and JS do.
SQL is great for a very specific job: talking to a database. If you try to do anything else in it, you end up in a horrible mess (e.g. cursors).
Luckily, people rarely try to do anything difficult in SQL, because they are using another language and dropping into SQL to talk to their database. This can lead to inefficient code, depending on the API/SQL engine, but it means people end up with sane code (unless their other language is PHP, of course.)
Yes. To be strictly fair, both JS and PHP have legitimate excuses; JS because it was done in an insanely short timescale, PHP because it was (initially at least) cobbled together by an amateur for his own purposes. I doubt anyone could have predicted that both languages between them would basically be running the planet by 2015 :)
They're sorry you're such a terrible coder, worse than Rasmus Lerdorf himself:
"For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)" - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf
1. Code is not English: Nice try COBOL, and someone had to try, but a failed experiment. Bizarre holdouts: SQL
2. People are not idiots, and will not collapse into a gibbering heap if their programming language insists that 0 and "0" are different things and must be managed accordingly. Bizarre holdouts: PHP, Javascript. Honourable mention: Excel (no Excel, that is not a f&@cking date, I will tell you if I want a date).