The Semicolon Wars

It’s hard and even impossible to imagine a person that can be a true polyglot programmer, since there are more than 2,500 programming languages. This becomes more interesting thinking how the 6,192 human languages have been evolving for a millennium, while the programming languages started just 50 years ago.
For me, it’s incredible to think that all the 2,500 programming languages were made as an attempt of reaching “the best notation—or even a good-enough notation—for expressing an algorithm or defining a data structure.” (Hayes, 2006). I really think this is more a personal approach, because, as Hayes said in his article, every single programmer may say that they have found the perfect or the best programming language and I’m sure the answer will differ in most of the cases. 
I’d never thought how programming languages are different. 
They could differ in syntax, like the use of semicolons (as separator, terminators or not using them), the comments inside a program and other specific syntax a language can present. This isn’t the only thing in which languages can change, there also categories that define different modes of thinking and solving a program. Those categories are: imperative, functional, object-oriented and derivative programming. And then, they could also be classified in low-level and high-level languages. As we can see, it’s obvious that there is not a better language, they’re just different. And it’s shocking when thinking that despite that difference, if you “compute something in one language, you can get the same answer in any other, given enough effort.” (Hayes, 2006).

Before reading this I thought that the best programming language was Python, Java or C, but this text made me think about that great variety out there and that I may have to explore some new ones in order to find my personal best programming language.

Reference
  1. Hayes, B. (2006). The Semicolon Wars. American Scientist. Recuperado de: http://webcem01.cem.itesm.mx:8005/s201813/tc2006/semicolon_wars.pdf

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