Programming Language Tournament

currentStatus = "Brief intermission before Round 2"

Welcome to the programming language showdown!

(current results)

Here's the rules/faq:

Propaganda is allowed, tag me and I'll probably reblog it, yell about why powerpoint is a superior development environment to brainfuck or something

A programming language is any interface for developing a program or system, that is written/used via software, and is turing complete. Some examples:

Python, yes this is a programming language

Machine code, yes this is also a programming language

Minecraft redstone, yes this is also a programming language

Microsoft PowerPoint, yes this is also a programming language

A physical circuit, no this is not a programming language

A banana, no this is also not a programming language

Additionally, different versions of the same language are not different, even if they're significantly different, e.g. Python 2 and 3

Different flavours or versions of a language are different, however, provided they are compiled/transpiled/interpreted/written differently to each other, e.g. TypeScript and JavaScript are different langs

Be nice to eachother, and also to me, this is my first time running a tournament so uh, let's figure it out together hey?

I'm a bit busy for the next day or so while I write a parser for a uni task, so in the interim, here's that SQL pronunciation poll I promised while I get Round 2 ready :P

I'll also hopefully post some Infodump box highlights tonight or tomorrow :)

For two, this language forces you to be an absolute beginner by just not having anything complicated like memory and variables. If you wanna do one thing on two beepers and something else on three, you write

if next to beeper

pick beeper

if next to beeper

pick beeper

if next to beeper

//thing for three beepers

else

//thing for two beepers

and that's just how it is. perfect imperative programming with no nonsense. Also my boy is a turing machine, like, trivially. Tape? that's the grid baby! symbols on tape? stacks of beepers! read/write head? my main man Karel!!

please consider voting for my much loved Karel, he deserves some love I've only just tracked down the version i learned with like two days ago.

#karelSweep

And round 1b is up finally! Sorry it took so long, work and uni have been kicking my ass 😅

There's also an extra tiebreaker match for Scheme vs VHDL so check that out!

Anyways, here are the reuslts so far!

I'll also probably do an SQL pronunciation poll and post some of the infodump box submissions at some point over the coming days before round 2 so keep an eye out for that!

Our next matchup features a language mostly designed with the purpose of *not* fucking with your brain, and a language called brainfuck. Draw whatever conclusions you will from that.

BrainFuck

The name says it all really.

Python

A pretty nifty little language, though it's frequently slow and has some rather unique syntax. It's found a real home in rapid prototyping, statistics, and machine learning work thanks to its flexible syntax though.

The difference between Forth and Microsoft Power Automate, is that before this, I knew nothing about Forth, and now I want to know more, but before this I knew too much about Microsoft Power Automate, and now I want to forgetti spaghetti.

Forth

I've never heard of it before this, and you probably haven't either, so here, I've saved you a google search: Forth (programming language) - Wikipedia

Microsoft Power Automate

Remember what I said in Match 1B[1] about no-code/low-code products frequently being buzzword filled empty promises of lowering your operational overhead, that actually increase development burden? Yeah, this is why.

It's ironic, the one that has Java in the name, is of these two, the least similar to Java. Funny how that works out, isn't it?

C#

You thought Oracle flavoured Java was bad? Try Microsoft flavoured Java.

JavaScript

is-even has 260K weekly downloads and it just returns the opposite of what is-odd says. But that's JavaScript for you.

Two languages that were probably someone's first introduction to programming. They might not be what you used now, but they're cute, friendly, and taught many of you the basics of what you do today at a vastly higher level. In that regard, they're pretty awesome.

Karel

You get to drive a tiny little robot around on a screen and make it do things, and that's just adorable.

Scratch

You've heard of it, you probably used it in high school if you're the right age, it's somehow way closer to a real programming language than you remember, but you probably just used it to load up the tutorial games in class didn't you :P

Despite being a more niche domain-specific language, I'm guessing somehow more of you have probably heard of and/or used SQL. Funny how things work out like that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

SQL

It's pronounced "SQL", unless it's PostgreSQL then it's pronounced "SQL", or if it's SQLite then it's pronounced "SQL".

Haskell

The coolest language you've never tried. It's like a bunch of math and computing theory nerds got together and made a programming language that only they understand. Sure, you trade away things like variables and control flow, but that's a small price to pay for pure functional programming, or so they'd tell you.

Ok I'm actually really not sure how to tie these two together, there's not even a first letter for them to share so uh... voting time?

LabView

I don't know too much about this language, but I can tell you now, from thirty seconds on the website, GUI-based programming never looked this good.

TypeScript

Microsoft finally, despite all odds, managed to produce something good, stable, and open source, and by the good graces of fate, it was a way to make JavaScript less awful. Good job Microsoft.

Continuing in the theme from Match 1B[0] of starting with the same letter, MIT App Inventor and Rust were both created at organisations starting with M, MIT and Mozilla respectively. Once again, that's pretty damn near the only similarity I can think of.

MIT App Inventor

Normally no/low-code solutions are plagued by crappy apps and endless corporate buzzwords promising to somehow magic away your engineering teams, but somehow this seems to actually be used pretty appropriately and be doing some pretty cool stuff. Nice.

Rust

They said memory safe C couldn't be done, and they said C++ without piles of bloat and cruft tied on couldn't be done either, yet here rust stands, being just about exactly both of those things at once.