I'm going to keep this up above the flamewar level here. First of all, in all respect, let's get away from labeling things as "fringe" languages. I think that's more hurtful then helpful.
As a kid I learned how to program in Applesoft basic. That had line numbers in it, goto statements, and all the other crap that was awful at the time (as was deemed so by pascal experts at the time). And I turned out okay. ;) There are a lot of people that grew up on the dos prompt and became productive members of society as well. > The main problem I have with python itself is that whitespace *still* > matters in its syntax. To the best of my knowledge, we no longer use > punch cards for programming purposes anywhere in industry so that should > have been phased out long ago. You would not believe the fights among professional engineers that were spent in meetings about a code formatting tool that failed to format to the given code standard. Whitespace matters, as it turns out, even if the language itself is agnostic about it. > Java is similar because in their quest for extremely re-usable cde, > they usually end up importing tons of data structures unnecessarily, > which takes it's toll in the form of the humungous memory & cpu > footprint of their apps. If you want an example, try LSI's new raid > management software -- java-based, and it shows. There's a measurement of risk with any large software project. Java was successful by removing risk during development. The tradeoff was that larger iron was needed to run it. More than one company was willing to do just that, trading labor costs with capital expenditures while getting a lower risk to deployment. It's not good or bad, per se. It just is. > I'm not saying it isn't possible to write good programs in even > fringe > languages; I'm just saying you better have a damn good reason to use > a > fringe language in the first place, since there are going to be fewer > people using it outside of those non-fringe cases which are more > easily > and better covered by mainstream languages. I personally believe python is very much in the mainstream. A quick glance shows there are nearly 2000 python packages in the Ubuntu repos. --R _______________________________________________ Fwlug mailing list [email protected] http://fortwaynelug.org/mailman/listinfo/fwlug_fortwaynelug.org
