Bud Manz wrote:
One thing I would like to mention also is the fact that, in academia,
the language should not be the primary focus for programming classes; it
is really, at that point, just a vehicle to teach programming logic. If
a student can learn how logic works and have a good foundation in
understanding good programming concepts, the language can be refined as
they choose a job.
Indeed, it *shouldn't* be, and in fact wasn't at my alma mater. In fact,
there was a class at the beginning of my junior year where each of
us *had* to get intimate with a different language than what they'd
originally taught us, and no two of us could choose the same one. After
learning anything and everything about our chosen languages, I noticed
when it came to group projects there was a bit of a tug-of-war about
which language would be best suited for the task. Of course, the point
of the assignments weren't really the coding itself per-se, it was the
design processes that happened beforehand. If the design is done
properly (not with a particular language in mind) *any* language should
suffice for the coding process.
Python's premises seem to be that 1) The designers of the software are
stupid; that only the python dev's know how things SHOULD be done, and
2) software is art. I haven't used python in any but a very simple
'hello world' program, but it seems to me that both of these premises
run counter to the stated goals & would result in having to alter the
design to fit the language rather than fitting the language to the design.
I am a case-point in study with that truth... I took 2 semesters of C++,
1 of VB (6), 1 of RPG IV, 1 of COBOL, 1 of CL Programming and when I
started working for the college, they were still back on RPG II which,
for those who may not know what that is (not Role-Playing Games lol), is
a fixed format language that is very indicator(boolean) heavy language
that frequently uses goto for branching.
Even though my instructor
taught us to never use a goto, I still find myself (for quick and dirty
scripts) using them in Oracle's PL/SQL, although it is very infrequent
and never in production scripts.
Mine did too, but I occasionally find myself using them for signal
handlers and such. I guess you can't always blindly believe what the
instructors are teaching, either ;)
Respectfully,
Bud
On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 6:09 PM, Rob Ludwick <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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
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