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.

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