• meowmeowbeanz@sh.itjust.works
    162·
    21 hours ago

    If programming languages are made for humans, then explain Assembly. Or better yet, try debugging a segfault in C at 3 AM and tell me that was designed with human comfort in mind.

    Sure, some languages pretend to be human-friendly (looking at you, Python), but then you hit regex or dependency hell, and suddenly it’s like deciphering alien hieroglyphs. Let’s not even start on Lisp—parentheses everywhere like it’s trying to smother you in syntax.

    No, programming languages aren’t made for humans—they’re made for machines, and we’re just the poor fools trying to survive the translation layer.

      • meowmeowbeanz@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        13 hours ago

        Ah, I see where you’re coming from—my earlier post was meant as humor, but I might have leaned too hard into the sarcasm. No offense intended!

        To clarify, there are languages and tools designed with machines in mind. Assembly is the classic example, but let’s not forget LLVM. It’s not a language per se, but an intermediate representation that optimizes code for machine execution. It’s like the ultimate translator between human-written code and raw machine instructions.

        Still, regex at 3 AM? That’s a universal nightmare no matter what abstraction you’re working with.

    • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      13 hours ago

      i prefer c than python tbh. When I write a c application, it keeps working. When I write a python script, it rots and rarely lasts a year before I have to stop whatever else I’m doing and dive back into the python code to get it working again

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
    391·
    1 day ago

    The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)

    • Kacarott@aussie.zone
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Brainfuck is genuinely a fun toy language, and not that hard to use (for fairly simple stuff anyway). For really anti-human check out malbgolge 🫣

    • Platypus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      23 hours ago

      Those are arguably the most “made for humans” languages—they’re made to make humans laugh and/or headbutt a railroad spike in frustration

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    You should have tried programming a 68000 about 40 years ago. I dreamed in binary for the duration of that class.

  • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
    41·
    19 hours ago

    Adding to what others in thread have said, there are languages that are more usable and are more user-centric.

    SFW edit: There are automatic transmission cars and manual transmission cars, both made for humans, one easier than the other. There are calculators that can compute lots of values and mental math classes, both for humans, one easier than the other. Ergonomics matter.

    Although I do concede that, depending on the context, knowing more about something is better than not. I wonder what happened to the original meme’s author for them to create the meme.