That ought to be obvious, but you still find people arguing all the time that it's the job of the programmer to mould themselves to the machine rather than the other way around. Of course, they don't mean to do this--often they don't even realize that's what they're saying. After all, few people deliberately search for obstacles to place in their own way, but that doesn't change the fact that people--and especially program language designers--still accidentally do it all the time. So, here's the question: How do you know when a programming language is preferencing the machine over the programmer?
Answer: Anytime a programming tutorial tries to justify a feature because of the machine's needs, it's probably a mistake. The best example of this kind of mis-feature is zero based indexing.
For those new to programming, picture an array of five objects: [1,2,3,4,5]. Now, let's assign that array a name:
array = [1,2,3,4,5]Ok, so far so good. Now, let's pull out the third item from that array. How do we do it? Well, if you didn't know anything about how most programming languages work, you might guess something like this:
print array[3]But that's actually wrong for arrays with zero based indexes because what that means is that you start counting at ZERO instead of one. So, the code above (print array[3]) would actually print the FOURTH item in the array, not the third. Which means that every time you want the third item, you have to actually ask for the second one instead like so:
print array[2]Let me say that again, To get the third item in the list, you have to ask for the second.
If you are new to programming, this looks like sheer lunacy. And most of the time it is. Zero based indexing is horribly unintuitive. Human beings just don't count this way. Now, it may still offer some advantages if you are worried about every byte being produced by your compiler. So, if you program in Assembly, C, or C++, then I exempt you from this essay. But that's it. Everyone else should start counting items at one. So who am I talking to?
If your programming language runs in an interpreter or virtual machine then I'm talking to you. If your programming language claims to abstract away pointers and manual memory management for the sake of increased productivity then I'm talking to you. If your programming language doesn't have pointers at all, then I'm definitely talking to you.
In other words, if you program in Python, Perl, Awk, PHP, Ruby, or Javascript then I'm talking to you.
Now, some languages already index their arrays at one. Here's a few: Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Ada, Lua, Matlab, Smalltalk, Erlang.
Notice anything? These are warhorses: industrial strength programming languages designed so that non-expert programmers could solve industrial strength problems. That's amazing. That's putting the human first.
Those languages might not be as fashionable as Python or Ruby, but so what? They work. And what's more, they eliminate a whole area of confusion and potential bugs simply by playing to the programmers intuition.
This should be the battle cry of every programmer. We should constantly challenge every feature in programming languages to make sure they always play to the human's strengths--not the machine's. We should be embarrassed every time a language tutorial has to explain a certain feature as being necessary because that's how the computer thinks.
What? If this is just about how computers think, then let's just stick to Assembly. Otherwise, let's admit that we don't think like computers and build our tools for ourselves instead, and every time someone says something to the contrary, just ask who they think the programming language is for.
Their answer might be illuminating.
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