Rob Ludwick 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.
Give me a more politically correct term then. I just chose 'fringe' for
lack of more descriptive terms.
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).
Ah, BASIC, I knew thee well...
Not sure I'd call it 'awful' though. Of course, I was doing BASIC back
in the 80's, and nothing I've read since indicated that goto's and such
had fallen out of fashion quite yet.
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.
Yeah, me too :)
Way back in the day the UNIXes was just for professionals...no real
chance of getting a copy without the internet, and certainly not as a
teenager who lived in rural Ohio.
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.
What you site is a human problem rather than anything languages should
address. To the best of my knowledge, there *is* no computer language
that caters to whiny, passive-aggressive/control freaks. That's why
managers exist -- to tell them to sit down, stop whining, and just be
productive :)
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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