Smiljan Grmek wrote:
> Tcl is an ugly duckling, to be sure - but all real-world langugages of
> any impact are: COBOL, FORTRAN, C, C++, (awk, perl ... and the
> unmentionable VB) with possible exceptions of PASCAL and ADA. For
> contrast we can look at the elegant ones: Algol, LISP, Smalltalk, Scheme
> (and here I refuse to name the recent ones, studies having shown that
> most of the people earning their bread by programming are incapable of
> understanding and using them). They are orthogonal, concise, clear - but
> used mostly by the academe and as test-beds for extensions
The argument is flawed. Smalltalk is in fact widely used in commercial
programming. So your nice separation into "ugly but used" vs "elegant
and academic" is false. Moreover Java is taking off commercially and yet
it is essentially a subset of Smalltalk.
Smiljan Grmek wrote:
> Is it possible that languages with bumps and rough surfaces are somehow
> easier to remember and decode when reading than quicksilver smooth
> theoretical ones? Is it perhaps easier to interpret an ad-hoc construct
> than to reconstruct semantics from first principles?
There is a much simpler reason why all these ugly languages about -- its
called intertia. There was a lot of code written in the 70s in ugly
languages -- written before we knew how to make good languages. All that
code has to be supported, interfaced to, etc, so all the ugly languges
it is written in are now the standard. Simple.
graham
--
well alas we've seen it all before
knights in armour, days of yore
the same old fears and the same old crimes
we haven't changed since ancient times
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