如何比较工作中的项目的编程语言？

Question

I am wondering what are some specific questions I should keep in mind when I am comparing programming languages for use on given work projects. For instance, I am told logic programming languages like Prolog are good for natural language processing. I'm not sure why exactly; I assume it is true because experts say so, but I don't know the consideration that guides them to that conclusion. So I am looking for a simple heuristic, a checklist of questions, I can apply to evaluate programming languages and be able to explain my decisions, so that I can say "Language X is good for Y because it does Z."

Answer 1

The only way I know of to figure out which programming language is most appropriate for a given problem, is to know lots of programming languages. After all, if you don't know screwdrivers exist, how will you know not to use a hammer when you encounter a screw?

Unfortunately, there are thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of programming languages, so learning even a significant portion of them is just not realistic.

However, programming languages implement paradigms . And Peter van Roy's famous poster only lists about 34 of those. Although he deliberately decided to ignore several aspects, including anything related to typing, so the real number is probably higher than that. But we can expect it to be well below 100.

That's still a lot, though, but thankfully, paradigms aren't atomic either, they are composed of concepts . The poster lists about a dozen of those (again ignoring typing and a couple of other things). Significantly less than paradigms.

Learning a significant portion of concepts is entirely feasible. Once you know them, you can look at a problem and see which concepts would be useful to have to build a solution. Then you look at which paradigms contain those concepts and which languages implement those paradigms. Pick one, learn it, use it, solve the problem.

And since you already know the concepts (and thus the paradigms) the language implements, you only need to learn the syntax, not the semantics. There aren't actually that many different syntaxes in the wild (C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, D, Go, Java, C#, ECMAScript, PHP, Vala and many others share a lot of syntax, for example, as do Smalltalk, Self, Newspeak and Objective-C, SML, OCaml and F#, and so on), so chances are, you'll pick that up very quickly. (Besides, with today's modern IDEs that's much less of an issue anyway.)

Answer 2

One small point to bear in mind: if you are an expert in language X and you are asked to develop a program in domain Y for which language Z is supposed to be ideal -- will you deliver sooner and better by writing in the language you are an expert in even if it is not (by some measures) ideal for the problem domain ? Or will you deliver better and sooner by first learning a new language ?

I think your search for a simple heuristic is in vain.

Answer 3

Start with what you're team is familiar with. While there's a lot to be said for the philosophy that a great developer can pick up almost any language in short order, there's a practical side that goes to the fact that if you have a ton of .Net or Java coders, you're best served in starting from that base.

Now, within both stacks you have options on things like functional programming (F#, Erlang, etc.) and other languages on the runtime your team is most familiar with. But it really does boil down to the culture, infrastructure, and (most importantly) the experience and flexibility of the individual developers on your team.

Answer 4

There are several factors to consider:

• What is your local expertise? If you have a company full of C programmers, it's probably not worth retraining everybody to be Lisp programmers.
• What are your libraries? If you have libraries that you want to use, make sure that they are compatible with your language of choice.

If you are starting a new project with a wide-open field of options, I would recommend taking a few sample problems out of the application domain. Nothing too complex, but nothing trivial either. Then, implement (or have someone from your team implement) these samples in each candidate language. Then, choose the one that is clear, easy, and appropriate.