Raul, I find the survey itself to not be constrained by the sentence you quote. Rather, I think with that sentence the author is trying to motivate readership with a provocative goal.
In particular I found the "language/stalement ranking" page extremely informative once I understood the controls. For example I was able to compare J and Haskell (a language I don't know at all but have been intrigued by because of its frequent mention on our forums.) The questions I selected as important to me were the following. 1 This language is well documented. 2 This language has a good community. 3 It is too easy to write code in this language that looks like it does one thing but actually does something else. 4 This language is good for scientific computing. 5 I often feel like I am not smart enough to write this language. 6 I would list this language on my resume. The results were very favorable to Haskell relative to J, except for question #5 and that is a critical question. http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1HCk4SenGJ9CQ7hKoWnOL7lx5oOUa0 -- This message was composed with PhatWare WritePad. On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > This survey looks clever, but it seems to start with a false premise: > that success/failure is a meaningful property of a language. > > Lanugages have communities, and they have uses but they do not have a > single universal goal which encompasses all thoughts that everyone has > about them. > > -- > Raul -- (B=) <-----my sig Brian Schott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
