Your programming language sucks

Your language sucks.md

You appear to be advocating a new...

• Functional
• Imperative
• Object-oriented
• Procedural
• Stack-based
• "Multi-paradigm"
• Lazy
• Eager
• Statically-typed
• Dynamically-typed
• Pure
• Impure
• Non-hygienic
• Visual
• Beginner-friendly
• Non-programmer-friendly
• Completely incomprehensible

...programming language.

Your language will not work for the following reasons:

You appear to believe that:

• Syntax is what makes programming difficult
• Garbage collection is free
• Computers have infinite memory
• Nobody really needs:
  • Concurrency
  • A REPL
  • Debugger support
  • IDE support
  • I/O
  • To interact with code not written in your language
• The entire world speaks 7-bit ASCII
• Scaling up to large software projects will be easy
• Convincing programmers to adopt a new language will be easy
• Convincing programmers to adopt a language-specific IDE will be easy
• Programmers love writing lots of boilerplate
• Specifying behaviors as "undefined" means that programmers won't rely on them
• "Spooky action at a distance" makes programming more fun

You don't appear to understand:

• Basic optimization techniques
• Basic systems programming
• Pointers
• Functions

Your language [(H)as/(L)acks/(O)ther/(U)nknown]:

• Comprehensible syntax
• Semicolons
• Significant whitespace
• Macros
• Implicit type conversion
• Explicit casting
• Type inference
• Goto
• Exceptions
• Closures
• Tail recursion
• Coroutines
• Reflection
• Subtyping
• Multiple inheritance
• Operator overloading
• Algebraic datatypes
• Recursive types
• Polymorphic types
• Covariant array typing
• Monads
• Dependent types
• Infix operators
• Nested comments
• Multi-line strings
• Regexes
• Call-by:
  • Value
  • Name
  • Reference
  • CC

The following philosophical objections apply:

• Programmers should not need to understand category theory to write "Hello, World!"
• Programmers should not develop RSI from writing "Hello, World!"
• The most significant program written in your language is its own compiler
• The most significant program written in your language isn't even its own compiler
• No language spec
• The implementation is:
  • The spec
  • Closed-source
  • Covered by patents
  • Not owned by you
• Your type system is unsound
• Your language cannot be unambiguously parsed
  • A proof of same is attached
  • Invoking this proof crashes the compiler
• The name of your language makes it impossible to find on Google
• Interpreted languages will never be as fast as C
• Compiled languages will never be "extensible"
• Writing a compiler that understands English is AI-complete
• Your language relies on an optimization which has never been shown possible
• There are less than 100 programmers on Earth smart enough to use your language
• ____________________________ takes exponential time
• ____________________________ is known to be undecidable

Your implementation has the following flaws:

• ____ do(es) not work that way:
  • CPUs
  • RAM
  • VMs
  • Compilers
• Shift-reduce conflicts in parsing seem to be resolved using rand()
• You require the compiler to be present at runtime
• You require the language runtime to be present at compile-time
• Your compiler errors are completely inscrutable
• Dangerous behavior is only a warning
• The compiler crashes if you look at it funny
• The VM crashes if you look at it funny

Your marketing has the following problems:

• Unsupported claims of:
  • Increased productivity
  • Greater "ease of use"
• Obviously rigged benchmarks:
  • Graphics, simulation, or crypto benchmarks where your code just calls handwritten assembly through your FFI
  • String-processing benchmarks where you just call PCRE
  • Matrix-math benchmarks where you just call BLAS
• Nobody really believes that your language is faster than:
  • assembly
  • C
  • FORTRAN
  • Java
  • Ruby
  • Prolog
• Rejection of:
  • Orthodox programming-language theory without justification
  • Orthodox systems programming without justification
  • Orthodox algorithmic theory without justification
  • Basic computer science without justification

Taking the wider ecosystem into account, I would like to note that:

• Your complex sample code would be far more compact in:
  • HASKELL
  • Python
  • Another language that out-shines yours
• We already have a(n):
  • Unsafe imperative language
  • Safe imperative OO language
  • Safe statically-typed eager functional language
• You have reinvented a worse version of:
  • Lisp
  • Javascript
  • Java
  • C++
  • PHP
  • Brainfuck, but non-ironically

In conclusion, this is what I think of you:

You have some interesting ideas, but this won't fly. This is a bad language, and you should feel bad for inventing it. Programming in this language is an adequate punishment for inventing it.