Getting the word to conventional programmers

[Cameron Laird]

*DevSource* profiles "The State of the Scripting Universe" in
<URL: http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778141,00.asp >.

 

[Peter Hansen]

*DevSource* profiles "The State of the Scripting Universe" in
<URL: http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778141,00.asp >.

Which, sadly, doesn't seem to work with Firefox here,
though IE shows it fine. :-(

 

[Peter Maas]

Which, sadly, doesn't seem to work with Firefox here,
though IE shows it fine. :-(

Mozilla 1.7.3 shows it fine, too. FF bug or config issue?

 

[Jeff Schwab]

Mozilla 1.7.3 shows it fine, too. FF bug or config issue?

FF didn't show it to me earlier, but it seems to work now.

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

Peter Hansen schrieb:

Mozilla 1.7.3 shows it fine, too. FF bug or config issue?

Came up on my system, from "About":

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225
Firefox/1.0.1
--

 

[Peter Hansen]

FF didn't show it to me earlier, but it seems to work now.

Thanks for the tip, Jeff. It is now working for me as well,
with zero changes to my setup. Odd....

-Peter

 

[Christopher Nelson]

Hey, Jeff Hobbs got the last word. ;-)

 

[beliavsky]

Advocates of languages and programming methodologies sometimes compare
the current version of their favorite language to an old version of
their disfavored language, resulting in skewed comparisons. For
example, Conway writes

"Interpreted languages do two things much better than compiled
languages.

Firstly, they provide more sophisticated programming tools and support
for more advanced programming techniques. For example, Perl provides
hashed look-up tables and arbitrary-length arrays as core data types. C
doesn't even have a proper string type. Likewise, Perl's data sorting
facilities are integrated into the language, so the sorting criteria
are directly programmable.

Having all the basic tools of programming (i.e. high-level data types
and common algorithms) built into the language, rather than having to
build them yourself, means that you need to write less code to solve a
given problem."

I think most of the advanced programming techniques he mentions are
part of the C++ Standard Library.

 

[sigzero]

That was a great article. I really enjoyed it. We need more like it.

Robert

 

[sigzero]

*DevSource* profiles "The State of the Scripting Universe" in
<URL: http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1778141,00.asp >.

It would have been nice to put in a blurb for some of the cool stuff
planned for 8.5. That way people could see that things are *happening*
in the Tcl world and Tcl is moving forward language wise.

That doesn't take away from the article though. It was just a thought.

Robert

 

[Cameron Laird]

.
.
.

It would have been nice to put in a blurb for some of the cool stuff
planned for 8.5. That way people could see that things are *happening*
in the Tcl world and Tcl is moving forward language wise.

That doesn't take away from the article though. It was just a thought.

.
.
.
Robert, though "just a thought", I want to say a few words in response:
you're wrong. Or, you're ambiguous: I think you're saying, "To appro-
priately infect readers with the enthusiasm for Tcl that you (and I)
think they deserve to have, it is necessary to anticipate the objection
that Tcl is 'dormant' and convince them otherwise."

Here's the problem: a magazine needs to be written for its readers,
rather than its authors or any other actors (from a business stand-
point, content ultimately is designed to serve advertisers, but that
rather dreary reality is a distraction we'll ignore for now). Lynn's
job was to profile the languages. To keep her scope manageable, she
did not address the cultures of the different languages. As I under-
stand her thoughts, she doesn't try to help the languages, but rather
help the readers.

It feels as though I'm hitting this tack of a point with a too-heavy
sledgehammer. I sure don't want to offend you, Robert; I *do* want
to take the opportunity to distinguish the different motivations afoot
here. While I think you already understand this, I'll make it explicit:
Lynn deserves our encouragement for her openness to ideas like use of
scripting languages, not our censure for failing to go far enough.

 

[sigzero]

.
.
. thought.
.
.
.
Robert, though "just a thought", I want to say a few words in response:
you're wrong. Or, you're ambiguous: I think you're saying, "To appro-
priately infect readers with the enthusiasm for Tcl that you (and I)
think they deserve to have, it is necessary to anticipate the objection
that Tcl is 'dormant' and convince them otherwise."

Here's the problem: a magazine needs to be written for its readers,
rather than its authors or any other actors (from a business stand-
point, content ultimately is designed to serve advertisers, but that
rather dreary reality is a distraction we'll ignore for now). Lynn's
job was to profile the languages. To keep her scope manageable, she
did not address the cultures of the different languages. As I under-
stand her thoughts, she doesn't try to help the languages, but rather
help the readers.

It feels as though I'm hitting this tack of a point with a too-heavy
sledgehammer. I sure don't want to offend you, Robert; I *do* want
to take the opportunity to distinguish the different motivations afoot
here. While I think you already understand this, I'll make it explicit:
Lynn deserves our encouragement for her openness to ideas like use of
scripting languages, not our censure for failing to go far enough.

The size of you hammer was okay with me. It takes a lot to offend me
and having delt with people from this group I know that most of the
stuff is constructive in nature anyway. : )

I did take the opportunity to submit the overall article to OSNews with
an extra link to the Tcl article.

Robert

 

[Cameron Laird]

Advocates of languages and programming methodologies sometimes compare
the current version of their favorite language to an old version of
their disfavored language, resulting in skewed comparisons. For
example, Conway writes

"Interpreted languages do two things much better than compiled
languages.

Firstly, they provide more sophisticated programming tools and support
for more advanced programming techniques. For example, Perl provides
hashed look-up tables and arbitrary-length arrays as core data types. C
doesn't even have a proper string type. Likewise, Perl's data sorting
facilities are integrated into the language, so the sorting criteria
are directly programmable.

Having all the basic tools of programming (i.e. high-level data types
and common algorithms) built into the language, rather than having to
build them yourself, means that you need to write less code to solve a
given problem."

I think most of the advanced programming techniques he mentions are
part of the C++ Standard Library.

In principle, yes--and that's certainly how C++ fans typically
feel. Frankly, Perl (and Python ...) implementations remain
more polished and mature than what the STL and allies offer.
I agree in general that people often say, "I like Y in year N
better than I liked X in year N-6, therefore Y is better than
N." Damian's not particularly prone to that error, though,
and I think, in the case at hand, C++ really *does* continue
to lag.