You tend to find two things relating to programming languages on the Internet. The first is a long list of all the languages, often with links to a representative web site. The second category are the “representative” web sites, detailed descriptions of a particular language.

I hope to make this part of ZX81.org.uk to be the middle-ground. I won’t cover every language ever designed and nor will I cover them in vast amounts of detail. Instead I’ll look at each languages main features, advantages and flaws.

Introduction

Talking about C is not easy. Almost all professional programmers have used it at some point and many have a strong attachment to it. I don’t want to start by saying that it’s a poor language, alienating much of my audience, but I figure I’m going to end up doing that anyway so I may as well get it out of the way at the beginning.

Compared to many languages that have come since, and even some that came before, C just isn’t a very good language.

Introduction

The open source community does a lot of things right. The internals of a program is one of them. The people who write code do so because they are proud of what they do and want the respect of other people in the community. The beauty of the code is a very important aspect in this acceptance.

The same isn’t necessarily true in the commercial world. Time-scales are much more important than how the guts of a computer system looks and it’s generally not good to be seen spending a bit of time making your code look pretty.

Introduction

Many developers would hate to have their master-work described as a mess, but not Larry Wall, creator of Perl and celebrity hacker. The way he sees it, the language is a mess because the problem domain — real life — is also a mess. He has a point.

I first came across Perl a few years ago when I was writing a program that required a certain amount of ‘screen-scraping’ from a telnet session, the ability to retrieve files using FTP, some complex processing and interaction with an Oracle database. This is a fairly messy problem, and one that Perl looked eminently able to solve.