HOT DOG Linux


The Ideal Programming Language

There are a lot of programming languages. Hot Dog Linux is written primarily in Objective-C, as well as Perl. Neither of them are perfect languages, but they are both practical.

However, the underlying philosophy of Hot Dog Linux is that the ideal programming language is assembly language, because of its simplicity. One of the characteristics of assembly language is that there is one instruction per line, which fits well with the idea that `Everything is a stream'. A stream becomes a sequence of instructions to be executed. Assembly language need not be a low-level language. Abstractions can be built so that it becomes a high-level language.

What is important are the instructions themselves, which becomes the vocabulary of the language. There can be different vocabularies for different situations, so that each vocabulary effectively becomes a separate language. But the structure remains the same, which keeps everything consistent. Syntax, grammar, and punctuation are not important, and only serve to complicate a language.

Other programming languages tend to hide the underlying model of a Turing machine, whereas assembly language keeps that model, so that the same structure exists throughout the system. A stream can be processed by implementing what is essentially a simple CPU, or a state machine.