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Re: Ousterhout article on scripting applies to scheme

To: scsh@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Ousterhout article on scripting applies to scheme
From: joswig@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig)
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 03:36:46 +0100
Organization: Lavielle EDV Systemberatung GmbH & Co.
In article <E7q6Bo.BBG@world.std.com>, wware@world.std.com (Will Ware) wrote:

> Scott Schwartz (schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu.NO-SPAM) wrote:
> : shriram@ollie.cs.rice.edu (Shriram Krishnamurthi) writes:
> : | I think Ousterhout's notion of a glue language is essentially bogus.
> : Given the number of success stories he cites, that's hard to
> : understand.
> 
> I have only skimmed the article so far, but one thing struck me immediately.
> At one point he gives an "anecdotal" table where something is programmed
> originally in C or C++, at enormous expense in programmer hours, and then
> re-implemented in Tcl/Perl/whatever in ten or fifteen minutes. It would be
> interesting to see if the same skew existed for programs that were written
> in scripting languages (or for that matter, Lisp or Scheme or Python) first,
> and then re-implemented in C or C++. It's hard to believe the ratios would
> be as large.
> -- 

His arguments on "typeless" languages is useless.
You don't need a "scripting language" to
get usable abstractions without the need
to deal with low-level issues.

button .b -text Hello! -font {Times 16} -command {puts hello}

In Macintosh Common Lisp I'll write this as:

(make-instance 'button-dialog-item
  :dialog-item-text "Hello"
  :view-font '("Times" 16)
  :dialog-item-action (lambda (item) (print "hello")))

You can develop user interfaces as fast as with TCL/TK with MCL.
Still you do it in one language, not in two. Without
external *and* internal representation of data/procedures as strings.

-- 
http://www.lavielle.com/~joswig/

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