GoKawiilI don’t know about you, but nothing gets me going in the morning quite like a good old fashioned programming language rant. It stirs the blood to see someone skewer one of those “blub” languages the plebians use, muddling through their day with it between furtive visits to StackOverflow.
(Meanwhile, you and I, only use the most enlightened of languages. Chisel-sharp tools designed for the manicured hands of expert craftspersons such as ourselves.)
Of course, as the author of said screed, I run a risk. The language I mock could be one you like! Without realizing it, I could have let the rabble into my blog, pitchforks and torches at the ready, and my fool-hardy pamphlet could draw their ire!
To protect myself from the heat of those flames, and to avoid offending your possibly delicate sensibilities, instead, I’ll rant about a language I just made up. A strawman whose sole purpose is to be set aflame.
I know, this seems pointless right? Trust me, by the end, we’ll see whose face (or faces!) have been painted on his straw noggin.
Learning an entire new (crappy) language just for a blog post is a tall order, so let’s say it’s mostly similar to one you and I already know. We’ll say it has syntax sorta like JS. Curly braces and semicolons. if , while , etc. The lingua franca of the programming grotto.
I’m picking JS not because that’s what this post is about. It’s just that it’s the language you, statistical representation of the average reader, are most likely to be able grok. Voilà:
function thisIsAFunction () { return "It's awesome" ; }
Because our strawman is a modern (shitty) language, we also have first-class functions. So you can make something like this:
// Return a list containing all of the elements in collection // that match predicate. function filter ( collection , predicate ) { var result = []; for ( var i = 0 ; i < collection . length ; i ++ ) { if ( predicate ( collection [ i ])) result . push ( collection [ i ]); } return result ; }
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