Since I began programming in 7th grade, I’ve used dozens of languages to do many different things. Some of these languages I liked, and some I did not.
The languages I like seem to have some basic things in common. The most obvious one is that they’re simple. Simple can mean one of many things, though, in a programming language. Maybe it would help if I used examples (in approximate order of increasing level of abstraction):
These are all languages that I consider “simple." There are many aspects to the simplicity of a programming language, but I think the primary one is this: It is easy, once you know a few simple rules about how the language works, to write non-trivial projects. This holds for the above four languages. There aren’t too many special cases for a programmer to remember.
In C, the only thing you need to hold in your mind is the basic abstraction of how the computer is actually doing computation. Once you have that, and a few syntax rules, you can write C effectively.
In Scheme, you need only one syntactic structure: The S-expression. You also need to understand the difference between functions and macros, but beyond that there are literally no special cases whatsoever. Function application is easy to wrap your head around, too, if you have a decent guide (Say it with me: “Thanks, Abelson and Sussman!").
Python and Ruby have objects at the center of their designs. In Ruby, everything you do is some combination of objects, methods, and blocks. In Python there are more special things to remember (list comprehensions, for loops, and iterators, to enumerate one category), but you mostly don’t *need* to remember them. And you can look them up when you do need them.
Compare these to a couple other languages I’ve been forced to use recently: C++ and PHP.
C++ is the antithesis of “simple." There are a million things to remember when writing C++ code. What exactly does “const static virtual string& my_method(void);" mean about that method? And why does the compiler freak out about the string reference being a const when I try to use it later? I have never written more than 30 lines of C++ without making some stupid mistake, and I’ve probably written more C++ than I have any other language. I get the impression that you would need to write C++ for years and years to ever even approach “proficiency."
PHP is the other antithesis of “simple." It’s the least consistent language imaginable. How anyone can write PHP without a reference manual in their lap is totally beyond me. Should functions be camelCased or under_scored? The language “designers" couldn’t figure it out, either! What gets cast automatically and what doesn’t? I guess we’ll find out! Objects? Yeah, we have those!
I guess the conclusion of all of this is that one should write interfaces that are consistent, that stay out of the way, and that require very little figurative disk-space in the user’s mind.
