Freedom and Safety Languages

Kevin Barnes describes the difference between "freedom" and "safety" languages.

Freedom languages are those languages that put the individual programmer at the center of their philosophical world.

Code Craft - Freedom languages - JournalHome.com

Some attributes of freedom languages:

• Reduce verbose language constructs
• "Post-modern" languages
• Syntactically dense
• Examples:

• Ruby
• Python
• Perl
• Smalltalk

Some attributes of safety languages:

• Contracts between modules, objects, and functions
• Focus on teams rather than individuals
• Remove language features that are confusing
• Syntactically verbose
• Examples:

• C++
• Java
• C#
• VB
• Delphi

Kevin claims that the philisophical differences can even be sensed just listening to how the advocates of a language describe its benefits and attempt to undermine other languages.