On 99-10-04 at 11:41, Brooks, Ruven <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> but no Java. Why not?
>
> Well, Java is argued to have two types of benefits: cross platform
> portability and improved syntax/semantics (usability?). We're
> developing for only one platform, so that cross platform aspect was
> not interesting. The syntax/semantics improvements would be the only
> benefit. Again these benefits must be traded the costs of dealing with
> a newer implementation of the compiler, environment, etc.
Well, personally I couldn't agree more. Java is nice as a language
but it's not a language that it's easy to make anything useful ... yet
(I hope)
> In the world of modern industrial software development, improving the
> design of programming languages - systems at the level of
> Python/Java/C++ is just about as useful as improving the naming of op
> codes for assembly language.
I don't want to argue with this ... my industrial experience is somewhat
small but all programming that is done isn't done by professional
programmers. So there are a lot of areas where people are using languages
(or should we say 'not using') that are completely wrong for the task.
Personally, I belive that we'll see more use of end user programming
environments and here research needs to be done to find out how to do
these languages.
> Suppose that someone offered me an improved version of a UML tool that
> did a better job of handling constraints, but it only could generate
> COBOL output. I'd have just two questions: (1) Where do I send the
> check and (2) what version of COBOL do I need to get?
This is exactly what I mean: UML is a language, so how should languages be
designed to fit different tasks ... like for example modelling of system,
authoring of multimedia documents, etc.
jem
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Jan Erik Moström mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Jan Erik Moström mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Free Elektron http://www.mostrom.pp.se/folk/jem/
