According to Bill House <bhouse@dazsi.com>:
:FWIW, there is also no mention of Tcl in the Programmer's Paradise catalog,
:even though there is an "Ask Dr. Morty" piece about scripting languages
:that mentions Awk, Perl Rexx, etc. Of course, that catalog is very
:WinTel-centric. I guess my point is that, unless you are steeped in UNIX,
:you may never have come into contact with Tcl. Lisp, OTOH, is still the
:language of choice for a whole universe of non-platform-specific apps,
:namely AI.
All I can say is that I've been programming a variety of applications,
using applications and been on various OS platforms since 1974 and have yet
to personally find an application using Smalltalk, LISP and Scheme (or Eiffel).
I know they are out there. I read lots of articles telling me how invaluable
these languages are. So far, the languages I have found myself needing,
or at least drawn too, are assembly, BASIC, sh, awk, C, C++, tcl, perl
and java. I've dabbled with Python and ABC. I've built and tried
quite a number of others - including at least one version of scheme. I
just haven't found something that I needed to do that required anything
other than the 9 languages above yet. When I do, I'll add them to the
toolbox.
So the 'my language is better than your language' wars aren't a form
of entertainment to which I'm particularly drawn. As for the various
comments regarding Mr. Ousterhout's paper, the one thing I can point out
is that Mr. Ousterhout posted a few weeks ago that he was looking for
comments and input regarding the savings possible with scripting languages.
There was little comments posted at that time - I assumed that folk
were sending him their feedback in private mail. Then, last week, Mr.
Ousterhout posted a note about this draft of the paper, asking for
comments and feedback. Some folk are contributing that - others seem
to be obsessed with flaming instead of contributing either public
or private feedback regarding their concerns.
--
Larry W. Virden INET: lvirden@cas.org
<URL:http://www.teraform.com/%7Elvirden/> <*> O- "We are all Kosh."
Unless explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting should
be construed as representing my employer's opinions.
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