On this page, I will present the results of a two-days research on comparing programming languages, and a statement of opinion I have come up with, two years ago.

Background

In the middle of 2002 summer's vacations, I was playing around with Scheme, during a study towards providing interactive scripting shell for use with the Vaucanson project. For six months then, I had been working on providing scripting features to heavily templated C++ code.

Of course, before convincing myself that I was going in a hopeless direction, I wanted to check every accessible opportunity. First, listed all features of programming languages I was using during my researches. Then, I compared languages based on that list. Hence the results presented below.

Rant: it happens that am fond of programming, and I have been practicing a lot of different languages for the sake of expressing ideas in different ways. In fact, I belong to the camp of those people who believe that no programming language deserves more pride than another. When thinking about a scale, the value I use is the ratio between the number of programmers who use it and the number of programmers who efficiently use it. That value should prove nearly equal for most languages, which is... fine. Actually, any attempt to use scales of other values in order to classify languages into "good" or "bad" categories is, in my humble opinion foolish and tasteless.

Results

The result of the study has been layout on a Gnumeric spreadsheet, and can be accessed there:

• Gnumeric
• PDF
• HTML
• PostScript

Please note the following:

• Many fields are marked "U" which means "Unknown" (by me)
• Some information is erroneous or blatantly false, since I didn't spend much time on checking every detail. Thank you for reporting any mistakes.