A few days ago I met with a developer, and of course (as happens with developers) the question arose relatively quickly about what programming language they were using. Then I told a little about what we were doing native web Do what we do and who we work with.
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Golo Roden is the Founder and CTO of Native Web GmbH. He is engaged in the conceptualization and development of web and cloud applications and APIs with a focus on event-driven and service-based distributed architectures. Their guiding principle is that software development is not an end in itself, but should always follow an underlying professionalism.
And of course I asked him what it was like for him. Then felt a little embarrassed:
“Okay, I only work with Visual Basic.”
He was clearly uncomfortable with this answer, and then I asked him why. He told me that he often felt that after this answer, other developers no longer took him seriously, but instead laughed at him. According to the motto:
“Oh look, how cute, someone actually still works with Visual Basic!”
Admittedly, Visual Basic doesn’t have a particularly good reputation. Rather, on the contrary: the language is considered outdated, inferior, in short, “bad”. But of course the question arises: what’s in it? Is Visual Basic really such a bad language? To be able to answer this, you have to ask the question a little more generally, namely: what exactly characterizes a good or bad programming language?
Objective Criteria vs. Subjective Opinion
Before we begin, I would like to give some pointers. First of all: There is no answer to this question A scientifically based and completely objective answer. The very definition of “good” and “bad” is a matter of interpretation. So I will do my best to present the whole thing objectively, not argue emotionally and base my claims on facts. However, what is written here is my personal view of things. So before criticizing in the comments, it would be nice if you could keep this in mind.
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Your programming language is $#&!% 🤬 // German
Second: I’m not talking specifically about Visual Basic in this blog post. Rather, I try to explain how I determine whether I consider a language to be good or bad. I provide the criteria I consider important and explain why I consider them important. It’s totally fine if you say that these criteria don’t apply to you or you evaluate them differently. Because when it comes to quality, your own value system also plays a role. And it definitely looks different for you than it does for me, simply because we have different experiences.
Third: In general, I would like to ask that you be kind to each other in the comments and treat each other constructively. Even if you don’t like the language someone else prefers, that doesn’t make them a bad person. It’s perfectly fine to critically question technologies. We should treat other people with respect despite criticism.
Appropriate and inappropriate languages
This finally brings us to the real topic: what makes a programming language good or bad?
The answer often given is: A language is good if you can use it to achieve the desired goal. According to the motto: If a language serves its purpose, it cannot be bad. However, for me personally, this is not a particularly convincing argument. Just because a tool accomplishes a task doesn’t mean it’s a good tool – it’s simply a suitable or appropriate tool for the task.
Whether this is a good thing or not is another matter. You notice this only recently when there are multiple tools for the same task. Because then differences often arise. In this regard, for me, “good” and “appropriate” are two different things. Conversely, a language is not inherently bad just because it is inappropriate for a problem. Then it is completely unsuitable for this problem. To me, “good” or “bad” are terms that refer to a qualitative assessment of a language, regardless of its suitability for a particular problem.
language vs implementation
A similar point is the feature set of a specific implementation of a language. For example, in the past it was often said that C# was a bad language because it only ran on Windows. This is wrong. Language itself is initially just a syntax with semantics for how one can express oneself. Whether there is a suitable runtime environment or a suitable compiler for a specific platform is independent of language considerations. Today it is easily possible to run C# on macOS or Linux. In this regard, these are not criteria for whether a language was well or poorly designed. It just says something about the availability of the implementation.
Another point: A language is not the same as its function or class library. This is also an implementation detail. There may be different environments for the same language that provide different amounts of “equivalents”. This is known, for example, from .NET or Java with different runtimes. So I’m really only concerned with what directly relates to language.
One could spend a lot of time discussing whether this distinction makes sense or not. That’s how I’d like to do it for today because in my opinion it’s the most useful definition when you want to talk about the design of a language.
