The biggest "industry standard" programming languages of today by far are languages like C++ and Java. And let me tell you - THEY SUCK. You couldn't pay me enough money to program in either of them (and I've been offered quite a bit). Either language will rot your brain to use it.
VERBOSITY
Consider a program which writes "Hello World" to the screen. Here it is in Java:
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello World");
}
}
plublic class HellowWorld? public static void main? system.out.println? Are you kidding me? The verbosity level of these languages is through the roof! Nevermind the fact that they are monstrously huge, flabby, underpowered languages to boot. These languages are just ugly, too. Periods between words used to send messages? Yuk.
Now, the same program in two of my favorite programming languages, APL or J (it's the same program in either language):
'Hello World'
Which would you rather write?
LOOPS
Often you need to do something to each element of an array. For instance, add 1, or divide by 7, or whatever. In a traditional programming language, you have to write a "loop" to do this. But you don't need loops in APL or J. To illustrate this, assume we have an array of numbers in a variable x. Here is the code in APL or J to add 1 to each element of the array:
x+1
I just completed an electronic exchange (i.e. NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ, etc). I used J. Not only did I complete it in 1% of the time it would have taken me in C++ or Java, and with literally 1% of the code size (the entire program is just a few pages long). But I didn't have to use a single loop.
Expressiveness and power
Using APL or J, it is possible to do many programs in just a single line of code. I have a recent post on writing code to automatically pug matches for these online pug games (https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/376301). But at any rate, here is my program in J to do it:
(#y) {. 1 (((#y) {. 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1) # (+:?2)(|.@{.,}.)\: y) } 10#2
Yes, that's the entire program, and it works. Sure, it's not documented, and it's terse and cryptic-looking, but I could document it and make it far less cryptic and far more readable. But the point is simply to show you what you can do in one line of code with languages like this. In fact, most of the space in the above program is actually taken up by static data in an array (1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1). Remove that and look at actual code, and you are literally talking about a couple of keystrokes that do a hell of a lot in a hell of tiny amount of space. If you are familiar with the classic "8 queens" (or "n queens") problem, you can do that in a single line of code using this language. How many lines would it take in a "normal" language like Java?
Oh, also notice no "if then else" statements, no "case" or "switch" statements, etc. It is often possible to write in these languages without using such constructs.
