I recently did the biggest bit of useful programming I’ve ever done—automating large chunks of sysadmin work—in ant. ant is basically makefiles for Java. But it’s Turing-complete!
What it feels like: using an esoteric programming language whose conceit is that all code must be correctly-formed XML. Most of the work was the mathematical puzzle of how to implement some really simple thing in ant. (Every domain specific language that is allowed to become Turing-complete will evolve into brainfuck.)
My point is not that ant is a horrible, horrible language to use for anything outside its narrow domain (though it is) - but that even when I’m coding in proper programming languages, the process feels much the same—it takes me half a day to work out how to implement the simple thing in my head, and coding feels like building a house one matchstick at a time. This leads me to suspect it’s me, not the languages. So it’s not just you.
I recently did the biggest bit of useful programming I’ve ever done—automating large chunks of sysadmin work—in ant. ant is basically makefiles for Java. But it’s Turing-complete!
What it feels like: using an esoteric programming language whose conceit is that all code must be correctly-formed XML. Most of the work was the mathematical puzzle of how to implement some really simple thing in ant. (Every domain specific language that is allowed to become Turing-complete will evolve into brainfuck.)
My point is not that ant is a horrible, horrible language to use for anything outside its narrow domain (though it is) - but that even when I’m coding in proper programming languages, the process feels much the same—it takes me half a day to work out how to implement the simple thing in my head, and coding feels like building a house one matchstick at a time. This leads me to suspect it’s me, not the languages. So it’s not just you.