Read-Only and Write-Only computer languages

A colleague and I were chatting the other day and we were talking about STL implementations (in the context of a broader discussion about template meta-programming and how difficult it is).

 

During our discussion, I described the STL implementation as “read-only” and he instantly knew what I was talking about.  As we dug in further, I realized that for many languages, you can characterize computer languages as read-only and write-only[1]

Of course there’s a huge amount of variation here – it’s always possible to write incomprehensible code, but there are languages that just lend themselves to being read-only or write-only.

A “read-only” language is a language that anyone can understand when reading it, but you wouldn’t even begin to be able to know how to write (or modify) code in that language.  Languages that are read-only tend to have very subtle syntax – it looks like something familiar, but there are magic special characters that change the meaning of the code.  As I mentioned above, template meta-programming can be thought of as read-only, if you’ve ever worked with COBOL code, it also could be considered to be read-only.

A “write-only” language is a language where only the author of the code understands what it does.  Languages can be write-only because of their obscure syntax, they can be write-only because of their flexibility.   The canonical example of the first type of write-only language is Teco (which was once described to me as “the only computer language whose syntax is indistinguishable from line noise”[2]).  But there are other languages that are also write-only.   For instance JavaScript and Perl are often considered to be write-only – the code written is often indecipherable to a knowledgeable viewer (but is almost always totally understandable to the author of the code).  It’s possible to write legible JS and Perl, but all too often, the code is impenetrable to the casual observer.

 

Of course anyone for someone who’s very familiar with a particular language, the code written in that language is often understandable – back when I was coding in Teco on a daily basis (and there was a time when I spent weeks working on Emacs (the original Emacs written by RMS, not the replacement written by Jim Gosling) extensions), I could easily read Teco code.  But that’s only when you spend all your time living and breathing the code.

 

 

 

 

[1] I can’t take credit for the term “read-only”, I first heard the term from Miguel de Icaza at the //Build/ conference a couple of weeks ago.

[2] “line noise” – that’s the random characters that are inserted into the character stream received by an acoustic modem – these beasts no longer exists in todays broadband world, but back in the day, line noise was a real problem.