John Ousterhout (ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com) wrote:
: In article <334B68EC.3F66@maths.anu.edu.au>, Graham Matthews
<graham.matthews@maths.anu.edu.au> writes:
: |>
: |> 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.
: Sorry, but this doesn't really make sense. For example, if "ugly languages"
: refers to Tcl or Perl or C++, none of these languages even existed in the
: 1970s.
Sounds like you need to review your history of languages. C++, while
not existing in the 70s, was designed to be a superset of a language
that was -- you get three guesses as to which language that is. Therefore
C++ _IS_ a product of inertia.
As for Perl and Tcl, they seem very "shell-like" to me, so I'm tempted
to say that they are also a product of inertia from that direction,
but someone with more knowledge in these particular languages would
do well to answer that issue, and also perform appropriate dating
as to the age of the predecessors of those 2 languages.
: In contrast, various flavors of Lisp have been around since at least
: the early 60's and Smalltalk first appeared in the late 60's.
I was under the impression that Smalltalk first appeared in the early
70s.
: Every single
: programmer who ever wrote a program in Tcl, Perl, C++, Visual Basic, or even
: C could have chosen Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk.
Here you show a grievous lack of common sense that goes well with your
lack of knowledge about language-history. The only programmers who
would be able to choose Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk are those who
would have known that those languages existed, and you would be
surprised at how many people do _NOT_ know they exist. I ran into
these languages because I was _ACTIVELY_ looking for languages,
this is the same reason I ran into Haskell (my favorite language).
Consider the average programmer who does not actively look for
new languages, but sits on her/his tail until some organization
hypes a marginal package as The Next Big Thing(tm), and then
proceeds to swallow it up. That's how crappy products become
big. That's the story of Tcl.
Many of the programmers I spoke with have very little if any knowledge
about the above languages, how can you even claim that they prefer
the languages they are using over the above ones?
Furthermore remember that most programmers program in the language
mandated by their employers -- I am the same way. We don't have
a choice most of the time.
: But they didn't. If you
: want to know the truth, I think you need to stop making superficial excuses
: and ask deeper semantic questions.
I think you need to wake up and smell the coffee. There are numerous
reasons why these superior languages were not chosen, the fact that
you are grasping at one flimsy reason does nothing but make one wonder
if you even have a clue.
: There really is something better about
: each of these "ugly languages" that gives them an advantage over the "good"
: languages; I'll leave it up to you to figure out what it is.
Let's see, C became popular for one reason only -- it was almost
mandatory for programming under Unix which was widespread (and
still is). So C rode on the coattails of an operating system, and
was not chosen on any virtue of the language itself. C++ is
popular for one reason only -- it isn't a far step away from C which
means that the C crowd flock to it in safety. So C++ rode on the
coattails of C which rode on the coattails of Unix.
Perl I could give some credit for -- it is a powerful tool although
its resemblence to shell scripting is still an issue which I feel
has helped it gain more acceptance. It's a lot easier to accept
something that looks familiar than something that looks foreign
(which explains why Lisp languages and Smalltalk didn't gain the
following that C and C++ did).
As for Tcl, it's there for one reason and one reason only -- strong
corporate backing. We've got a powerful company that wants to
make a quick buck and therefore is using its clout to force
Tcl down our throats. This is the same tactic used by charlatans
like Micro$oft. Indeed that's the only possible explanation
as to why a glorified text preprocessor would even get a second
look -- that and the fact that it is riding on the coattails
of Tk.
Try to come up with some arguments next time.
--
Cya,
Ahmed
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