What Languages Fix
Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way. Algol: Assembly language is too low-level.Pascal: Algol doesn't have enough data types.Modula: Pascal is too wimpy for systems programming.
- ▪Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes.
- ▪The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way.
- ▪Algol: Assembly language is too low-level.Pascal: Algol doesn't have enough data types.Modula: Pascal is too wimpy for systems programming.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
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Record
| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:32.298Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way. Algol: Assembly language is too low-level.Pascal: Algol doesn't have enough data types.Modula: Pascal is too wimpy for systems programming. Simula: Algol isn't good enough at simulations.Smalltalk: Not everything in Simula is an object.Fortran: Assembly language is too low-level.Cobol: Fortran is scary.PL/1: Fortran doesn't have enough data types.Ada: Every existing language is missing something.Basic: Fortran is scary.APL: Fortran isn't good enough at manipulating arrays.J: APL requires its own character set.C: Assembly language is too low-level.C++: C is too low-level.Java:…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.