
Ask HN: What are the fundamental tradeoffs in programming languages? - tomrod
I read about Peter Naur passing away today, and found myself spending a long time learning about BNF [0]. This re-opened a question I&#x27;ve thought about awhile, but never really had a chance to discuss with full-time developers, core language developors, and CS theorists. I&#x27;ve worked some with C, Fortran, Python, and some Julia, and have seen some of the superficial tradeoffs (e.g. antipatterns in Python being slow, C having a steep learning curve).<p>What at the deeper level separates languages? What keeps languages from implementing things<p>A) Fast<p>B) Simple syntax<p>c) Ubiquitous across architecture?<p>I imagine sometimes it&#x27;s a core dev issue, like Python&#x27;s UTF-8 implementation between 2 and 3.<p>More than a specific language issue, what kinds of tradeoffs are faced in the design of a language?<p>Looking forward to the answers!<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form
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LarryMade2
Access to resources would be one - web apps dont have access to much resources
beyond what's provided in the browser, where native languages can take better
advantage of a computers hardware and peripherals.

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jarcane
Sanity and time vs. employability and monetary compensation.

