The Semicolon Wars

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After reading "The Semicolon Wars" I agree with some points of the article. It is very impressive the diversity of languages that exist in the world and it is more impressive the number of programming languages that exist nowadays, around 8500 programming languages. But there's something very true: most of the programming languages aren't new, they take some elements of other languages and they improve them. There's no perfect language,

This part of languages taking parts and improving them can be seen with the semicolon. In some languages like Pascal, the semicolon indicates the separation between statements but in other languages like C, they are meant to indicate when one statement ends; this is the Semicolon war. The same thing with comments, in some languages you can comment using a "#" and in others using "/". Something I was very interested about was the use of 0 as the first number when counting elements of something and the decision of which bit must go first when storing and transmitting data.

Something very fascinating about programming languages is how the change from one to other, we can group languages en four categories to analyze them in a better way: functional, imperative, object-oriented and declarative. Every programming language has a different way of writing code that leads to a different way of thinking. Whenever you try to solve a problem you must consider every facility provided by the programming language chosen.

As a conclusion, I can say that even though the author was a Lisp Fanboy most of his arguments were correct. There's no perfect programming language or the ideal for developers, a good developer must know how to solve any problem by thinking the best solution to the problem. As I said, the best programming language will be that one that a person knows better because knowing a knowing a language and its implementations will allow you to think the best solution for any problem that you have.

References: 

- Hayes Brian, 2006 "The semicolon wars" American Scientist, 303.

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