> One side effect of reviewing all the > benefits of abstraction, encapsulation, information hiding, etc is the > recognition that M as a language supports very few of the concepts and > constructs that make the modern object-oriented languages so powerful > and so maintainable.
It's not a slam dunk among those in the know that Object Orientation is always suck a great thing. In fact, if anything, its a slam dunk that programming languages which insist on 24/7 can produce a lot of the illegible and unmaintainable code on the planet. And more so, produces a ton of code which is so fundamentally flawed that it is practically unusable. > As such, I'm becoming more and more interested in > pursuing alternatives to M code for interacting with a GTM database and > producing UI elements. > > As I believe a previous poster noted, Perl (like M) doesn't enforce good > coding technique -- that is left up to the individual, I don't know much about M, but according to you, there is no ready means of creating the kind of data abstractions routine in object orientation. But this is clearly capable in Perl and they can not be put together in this comparison. > which means that > "good technique" doesn't always happen, Good technique doesn't always happen ... PERIOD, language indifferent. This is not something that language choice can fix. > or at least happens > inconsistently. The Perl-M interface (which we are using more and more > at UCDavis) is a great start in the direction of being able to adopt the > OO ideals; but other languages, like java, python, and possibly PHP do > much more in terms of enforcing good technique. PHP doesn't even have a good object interface. Did you ever try to do double inheritance with PHP? Python is OK but is inferior to Perl in readability and is white space sensitive. It's a poor Perl replacement. Java? Java? My god. Few languages can be so abused and so unreadable so quickly as Java in the hands of an NYU undergraduate. I hate language wars, but at least get the facts straight. And for fun, lets just throw into this discusssion Small Talk, Cobol, Ruby, Effiel (talk about constraining the programmer), LISP, R, GAS, Dot Net, Mono, TCL, TK, Bourne, SQL92, Object C, Common C, Pascal, Delphi, Basic, Visual Basic in its 20 variants.Livewire, Cold Fusion, and OS-9 Assembler for the TSR 80. And when your done, they'll all look like garbage compared to well written Perl because in Perl, linguistics was at the top of the design and is inherently readable. God forbid that anyone can mention Perl without a cry going up about PHP!! Jeeeezzzzzzzz > I'll be very interested > to see how these technologies can be used in conjunction with GTM. > > --Dennis > > Suchi Pande wrote: > > > Jim Self wrote: > > > >> One of the FORTRAN projects I was given to maintain made even > >> Fileman's generated code > >> look good, let alone Fileman itself. It was full of computed GOTO's > >> and no documentation > >> anywhere and was decidely unmaintainable. > > > > > > Impressive. Computed gotos were certainly one of the more horrible > > aspects of fortran. They were dropped in fortran 95 in recognition of > > Dijkstra's impassioned plea in his 1968 paper (Go To Statement > > Considered Harmful) where he wrung his hands and bemoaned "the quality > > of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of Go To > > statements in the programs they produce." > > > > > I can't imagine that anything a conscientious > > > >> programmer might create in Perl could be so bad. > > > > > > Well...the obfuscated perl contest has several beautiful examples each > > year. ;-) > > > > I think maintainable code depends mostly on the maturity of the > > programmer in the end. A mature programmer makes allowances and > > adjusts the language to suit maintainability more. > > > > I think mature programmers recognize that quick and dirty hacks tend > > to become permanent hacks. Perl, being capable of doing almost > > anything, and doing it in many ways, does tend to encourage quick and > > dirty hacks, which in turn tend to become unmaintainable permanent hacks. > > > > [Come to think of it, this morning I used perl 4 for dos (a 230kB > > download) on a script to do some spreadsheet arranging in a tiny > > amount of memory in a disgustingly quick and dirty manner. I was > > liberal with the comments though, so I expect it will be maintainable.] > > > > PJ > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > > SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO > > September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle > > Practices > > Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing > > & QA > > Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf > > _______________________________________________ > > Hardhats-members mailing list > > Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net > > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members > > ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
