If all turing-complete languages are equally expressive, how does adding another feature to a language that's already turing-complete can possibly make it more expressive than it already is? It was turing-complete before the addition and it's just as much turing-complete after the addition.
I'm not really impressed by turing-tarpit-style arguments. There's at least one thing I can do in Common Lisp that I can't in Java: Implementing new syntaxic constructs look exactly like they're part of the language. I won't bore you with a long laundry-list of other similar things.
In fact, you know what? If by the turing-completeness criterion all languages are equally expressive, then the important points of comparison between languages in terms of expressiveness are necessarily matters other than turing-completeness.
Or would you argue that, say, x86 machine-language is just as expressive as say, Java? According to your turing-completeness argument that would seem like a yes. By the way, I do include a certain measure of "productivity" in my use of the word "expressiveness". Do you?
You are exactly right. Turing completeness is irrelevant when comparing languages, because it is a property of both. Turing complete or not, good luck programming your graphics card with Tcl or having boilerplate-free Java. It just isn't possible.
But the way I see it is, "it's not my problem if people want to write boilerplate all day" or that they like Java. Using Java does not take anything away from me, except possibly contributions to the community. (But then, the fanbois are rarely contributors to the community. This is true even for me!)
You will never convince axod that Java would benefit from new features. He is happy to be in a minority here (a "smug Java weenie"), and that happiness is worth more than potential increased productivity.
HN is a weird place for programming discussions. People here seem to think that making a website that people will visit and look at ads on is somehow correlated to code quality. It's not. It's just that you will enjoy making that website more when you aren't manually writing your own delegation functions, or writing "Foo foo = new Foo()".
>> "Or would you argue that, say, x86 machine-language is just as expressive as say, Java? According to your turing-completeness argument that would seem like a yes."
Yes. I absolutely would, and I've written about the same amount of x86 code as I have Java. They are each suited better to different tasks, but they're both just as expressive for me.
If all turing-complete languages are equally expressive, how does adding another feature to a language that's already turing-complete can possibly make it more expressive than it already is? It was turing-complete before the addition and it's just as much turing-complete after the addition.
I'm not really impressed by turing-tarpit-style arguments. There's at least one thing I can do in Common Lisp that I can't in Java: Implementing new syntaxic constructs look exactly like they're part of the language. I won't bore you with a long laundry-list of other similar things.
In fact, you know what? If by the turing-completeness criterion all languages are equally expressive, then the important points of comparison between languages in terms of expressiveness are necessarily matters other than turing-completeness.
Or would you argue that, say, x86 machine-language is just as expressive as say, Java? According to your turing-completeness argument that would seem like a yes. By the way, I do include a certain measure of "productivity" in my use of the word "expressiveness". Do you?