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May 3, 2018 at 18:27 comment added Basile Starynkevitch You forgot that a software product needs to be documented
May 3, 2018 at 16:44 comment added grovkin @leftaroundabout, but being able to do anything is a necessary component of actually doing it.
May 3, 2018 at 16:00 comment added leftaroundabout Being able to direct attention somewhere is not the same thing as actually doing it.
May 3, 2018 at 15:51 comment added grovkin @leftaroundabout, not at all. Expressing anything well requires being able to direct attention towards the thing. Trying to express all types of abstractions well would mean bringing attention towards all of them. And that would scatter attention and cause the ideas to be expressed poorly. There is nothing wrong with picking what to emphasize and concentrating on that.
May 3, 2018 at 8:35 comment added leftaroundabout Sure people use different abstractions. My point is that a good language should be able to express all these abstractions.
May 3, 2018 at 1:30 comment added grovkin @leftaroundabout it's a common mistake to confuse what a language can do and what it expresses well. The purpose of a high-level language is not to solve a problem. It is to act as a syntax for expressing a solution to a problem in a way in which some tool can turn this expression into a task for a computer to perform. Given this, it's important to remember that the actual work of expressing is done by people. And people use different abstractions to describe solutions to problems from different domains.
May 2, 2018 at 13:18 comment added leftaroundabout “A language that may be good for writing a product's run-time is very unlikely to be just as good”... programming languages don't come out of a random process, so it's a bit weird to talk about likelihood this way. Programming languages are designed to solve some task. Now your point is that a language is unlikely to also, by accident, solve another problem too that it wasn't designed to solve. I would argue though that the essence of programming is to abstract over all problems one could wish to solve, and a really well-designed language should thus be just as good for any task.
Apr 30, 2018 at 16:48 history edited grovkin CC BY-SA 3.0
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Apr 30, 2018 at 1:04
Apr 29, 2018 at 16:55 history answered grovkin CC BY-SA 3.0