I'm not entirely sure there's any large and complex C/C++ application which would be considered 'clean' by any generally accepted standard.
And in any case, i'm not sure that requiring anyone who wants to put up their own webpage to know how to write an OS level application necessarily leads to a web with freer expression than exists now.
True, but people associate it with web development. Do a university course, most likely they'll teach you PHP. Contract someone to do a small site for you, they'll probably use PHP. WordPress uses PHP and it's the foundation of some of the most popular websites on the web.
Even if you want it or not, PHP is part of the web, de facto or not.
Nobody said it's completely awful. It's just that using learning another language for it isn't necessarily the best way to go for someone new. Just like I'd rather use only one single language for scripting on my PC, not 5.
Well, if a database were a PC that you were writing some scripts for, then it might make sense to control it with the same language you use for scripting your PC, wouldn't it? I'd say it's a different enough thing that the same tool doesn't fit both well.
But to be serious, it's not the language that's the barrier. It's the concept of sets and set computation that's different from the more normal things. The language just happens to address the problem domain pretty well. What avoiding learning a smidge of SQL does is allow you to avoid learning to understand your data. And that's probably fine for a beginner. But the article wasn't really addressed to what's wrong with the web for beginners. It's about what's wrong with the web, period. And I don't think that SQL--as a langauge--is really a problem.
CoffeeScript sure does have some problems of its own, but it was designed to be compilable to JavaScript.
And of course developers are not going affected by the flaws mentioned in the snippets, but they're present and not nice. Would you like to work on a desk that's always messy?
