Thursday, October 23, 2008

Things I don't like

Specifically, things I don't like in programming languages. When I design the world's perfect programming language, none of these things will be in it. I'm not going to justify any of these things, I am after all meant to be finishing my thesis.

arrays
overloading
pointers
inner classes
primitive types
raw types
private/protected/public annotations
Java-style reflection
non-reified generics
almost everything to do with concurrency
wildcards (the syntax, the underlying idea is nice)
packages
non-virtual inheritance
friend functions
\* *\ comments (rather then \\)

These are mainly OO/Java-ish things, I'm sure I could think of as many from other paradigms, but I'm a bit OO focused at the minute.

Some we just have to put up with because there is no neat, all round solution (eg primitive types). Others are not as good as they could be (reflection, concurrency support), and others just shouldn't exist (statics, arrays, most of the rest)