Sure. But the gist of the rant is that he keeps doing the same repetitive, mundane tasks over and over again, merely to shuffle data from one part of the system to another and convert between representations on the way.
Like when you have a database, a server application and an AJAX web page, you may have four to five different representations of the same data (DB table, server language object, JSON, Javascript object and finally HTML) and need a whole bunch of code just to move data from A to B and convert between representations.
It's not just a language problem. It's just as much a problem of impedance mismatch between different systems, protocols and data formats. Various frameworks attempt to reduce the tediousness, but tend to come with issues of their own.
PG has something on this too:
"Of course the ultimate in brevity is to have the program already written for you, and merely to call it. And this brings us to what I think will be an increasingly important feature of programming languages: library functions."
"I think a lot of the advances that happen in programming languages in the next fifty years will have to do with library functions. I think future programming languages will have libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language."
Whether the common case is made simple by the language, libraries, frameworks or standardization (we may need all of them) ultimately does not matter much to the developer, only that you can handle conceptually trivial everyday tasks with the minimum of fuss.
We have a long way to go before this becomes a reality.
Like when you have a database, a server application and an AJAX web page, you may have four to five different representations of the same data (DB table, server language object, JSON, Javascript object and finally HTML) and need a whole bunch of code just to move data from A to B and convert between representations.
It's not just a language problem. It's just as much a problem of impedance mismatch between different systems, protocols and data formats. Various frameworks attempt to reduce the tediousness, but tend to come with issues of their own.
PG has something on this too:
"Of course the ultimate in brevity is to have the program already written for you, and merely to call it. And this brings us to what I think will be an increasingly important feature of programming languages: library functions."
"I think a lot of the advances that happen in programming languages in the next fifty years will have to do with library functions. I think future programming languages will have libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language."
http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html
Whether the common case is made simple by the language, libraries, frameworks or standardization (we may need all of them) ultimately does not matter much to the developer, only that you can handle conceptually trivial everyday tasks with the minimum of fuss.
We have a long way to go before this becomes a reality.