On 4 Dec 2023, at 11:48, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> Am Mo., 4. Dez. 2023 um 11:24 Uhr schrieb Daphne Preston-Kendal <xxxxxx@nonceword.org>:
>
>> If you want Pascal, you know where to find it. /snark
>>
>> Scheme does not subscribe to this philosophy. We are definitively not in the business of preventing bad programming by restricting *all* programmers’ access to powerful primitives and abstractions.
>
> Even in Pascal, one can write unreadable code.  In fact, this is probably true for any programming language.

I firmly agree, but the idea that programming languages ought to be designed to try to prevent bad programs from being written turns up generation after generation. It is one of the arguments I frequently hear against Scheme and Lisp macros, i.e. that one can use macros create a sublanguage which nobody else can read. (That this argument still shows up long after the practice of creating ‘DSLs’ in other languages took off, often using little more than syntactic sugar for lambdas, shows how vacuous it is.) Indeed, if we subscribed to this idea, we would probably never even have had syntax-rules, much less call/cc.

Pascal is the traditional embodiment of a programming language designed to try to prevent the writing of ‘bad’ code. Others in this category include Python, where this sentiment has become embedded in the community (many Python programmers objected to the introduction of the ‘:=’ assignment expression on these grounds). Perhaps one can argue that the Python idea that ‘There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it’ is in essence the same argument as ‘There should not be a way to write bad code’.

Daphne