practice

Doi: 10.1145/1839676.1839693

Article development led by queue.acm.org

To move forward with programming
languages we must first break free from
the tyranny of ASCII.
By PouL-henninG KamP
sir, Please
step away
from the
asR- 33!

me I have a tough row to hoe, but I will attempt to argue that this time Pike is merely rearranging the deckchairs of the Titanic and that he missed the next big thing by a wide margin.

Pike got fed up with C++ and Java and did what any self-respecting hacker would do: he created his own language— better than Java, better than C++, better than C—and he called it Go.

But did he go far enough?

The Go language does not in any way look substantially different from any of the other programming languages. Fiddle a couple of glyphs here and there and you have C, C++, Java, Python, Tcl, or whatever.

Programmers are a picky bunch when it comes to syntax, and it is a sobering thought that one of the most rapidly adopted programming languages of all time, Perl, barely had one for the longest time. Ironically, what syntax designers are really fighting about is not so much the proper and best syntax for the expression of ideas in a machine-under-standable programming language as it is the proper and most efficient use of the ASCII table real estate.

oNe oF The naughty details of my Varnish software is that the configuration is written in a domain-specific language that is converted into C source code, compiled into a shared library, and executed at hardware speed. That obviously makes me a programming language syntax designer, and just as obviously I have started to think more about how we express ourselves in these syntaxes.

Rob Pike recently said some very pointed words about the Java programming language, which if you think about it, sounded a lot like the pointed words James Gosling had for C++, and remarkably similar to what Bjarne Stroustrup said about good ol’ C.

I have always admired Pike. He was already a giant in the field when I started, and his ability to foretell the future has been remarkably consistent. 1 In front of

it’s all ascii to me…

There used to be a programming language called ALGOL, the lingua franca of computer science back in its heyday. ALGOL was standardized around 1960 and dictated about a dozen mathematical glyphs such as ×, ÷, ¬, and the very readable subscripted 10 symbol, for use in what today we call scientific notation. Back then computers were built by hand and had one-digit serial numbers. Having a teletypewriter customized for your programming language was the least of your worries.

A couple of years later came the APL programming language, which included an extended character set containing a lot of math symbols. I am told that APL still survives in certain obscure corners of insurance and economics modeling.

Then ASCII happened around 1963, and ever since, programming languages have been trying to fit into it. (Wikipedia claims that ASCII grew the backslash [\]