The Semicolon Wars

[jcl]

Neat little article in American Scientist about the proliferation of programming languages and the resulting holy wars. Written for the layperson but still interesting. Intro:

The Semicolon Wars

Every programmer knows there is one true programming language. A new one every week

If you want to be a thorough-going world traveler, you need to learn 6,912 ways to say "Where is the toilet, please?" That's the number of languages known to be spoken by the peoples of planet Earth, according to Ethnologue.com.

If you want to be the complete polyglot programmer, you also have quite a challenge ahead of you, learning all the ways to say:

printf("hello, world\n");

Edited June 16, 2006 by jcl