Hi, Am Samstag, den 04.03.2006, 19:44 +0200 schrieb A.J. Venter: > > less power. It's always like that. The language of a human (and maths) > > is just so much more advanced than any computer language, it depresses > > me at times. (Assembly language is so primitive that we all stopped > > talking it by now, except when we absolutely must do it. But it sure is > > "flexible", like an atom - you can use tons of them to build a copy of > > the earth, given you have a few billion years time and way too much > > patience for your own good :)) > >
> This is a nice argument but it's highly subjective, I find OP to be the > computer language CLOSEST to human language, Exactly. I count Object Pascal to the best there are (speaking about expressiveness / clarity), actually (along with ada, oberon, smalltalk). > python and java both inherrited > too much ascii art from C++ java did, python not really.. most is pretty verbose and nice there... have an example? > and don't get me STARTED on perl ! eeek. well we all know the-language-we-dont-mention that is write-only, bogged down with as many operators as there a special characters on the keyboard and that has "evolved" to a real complex incomprehensible monster. > > One of the things I love about OP (a compiled language) is that it uses > mostly > WORDS to say things, not symbols, true it's slightly more typing - but it is > so much more readable. yes, especially for rare stuff. I mean "+" for "addition" is okay, but what's up with "&&" instead of "and", I mean it saves one char, but needs you to use the shift key now, so it saves 0 keys. And its cryptic. What is that for? And if you absolutely must, use "^" damnit, like in maths. Don't invent _another_ set of symbols for the same thing. And if the exact symbols don't exist on the keyboard, that should tell you something... like "hey! those symbols are not used by anyone on a computer" :) > > I always tell my trainee's "If I NEED comments to read your code - it is > badly > written". Of course I also make it absolutely clear that any program of more > than 100 lines which doesn't have comments is pretty much guaranteed to > ensure they won't get a permanent position with me, but comments should be > there to add clarity NOT to tell you what the code DOES ! yes. But I am at a phase now where even seeing "design patterns" strike me as odd. The language should do them if they are so essential. Why can I see them (and not really well either) in the source code? like observer pattern. That should be a property-change-notify instead... and so on... as a side note: what the hell is will all the people removing enumerations (ex. "TDirection = (East, South, West, North)") in later languages? If I can't write a lexer in a language something has to be really f*cked up with it. What are they thinking? (I'd really be interested, strikes me as odd...) > That should be > obvious just from reading the code. > > This isn't possible in most languages, in OP it's the default - that is why I > think it's such a brilliantly designed language, and the fact is this is > something Pascal has boasted since Wirth invented the first version of it. > > Pascal is probably the only language you can read (large sections of) aloud > without stuttering. yes > In other words, by your argument those languages have all > failed at exactly the supposed REASON they are interpreted/bytecompiled in > the first place. Mostly, yes. But it's also because the marketdroids only like stuff that builds on "proven" stuff, which of course means lowest-common-denominator, e.g. assembly or C. Changing slowly nowadays, though. For the wrong reasons. But I don't care about the reasons as long as the result is good in the end :) > > Like I said, it's way too subjective an argument. Now don't get me wrong, I > actually rather like python, it has a nice design (although the whole > whitespace has meaning thing annoys me a bit) and a fairly decent syntax but > the simple reality is that I write code which will end up running on thin > clients - that means if a computer slows down to any noticeable degree when > running 50 copies of the program at once -it's not good enough, and that > rules out python for anything complex. Yes, it should be compiled and type checking instead. Check out http://boo.codehaus.org/ though. I am generally opposed to scripting languages, *but* even for compiled languages garbage collection is the way to go, after having 40 years to test it, I think by now we can get it right :) (This is one of the major points object pascal doesn't have... it's not surprising and it's not essential and there are reasons against it, but manual memory management is just... so.. sigh... so manual; although "interface" refcounting is nice too - slower though) > Lazarus works beautifully, I have the language that I like for most work, I > can quickly design my GUI's in a RAD environment and the programs run FAST. > > In the end, Java has spent ten years telling programmers that computers are > now so fast that customers don't care about speed anymore, and in ten years > computers still haven't gotten that fast and frankly they never will because > as computers get faster customers will always expect software to get faster > at the same rate (and customers being customers they will expect it to be > just as fast on a PII). Yes, that's also what I found. Applications are still too darn slow. abiword still takes 5 seconds to start up which is 3 seconds too long! (I *am* serious btw) devhelp takes 7 seconds to start up which is 5-6 seconds too long. and so on. And I have a _really_ fast computer suitable for a programmer. Always have to keep in mind that users have 2 generations older hardware (and rightfully so, because their hardware bugs have by now been found). > In the real world, a program that runs slowly and > uses up a lot of resources annoys customers and they find another program. yeah > > Throw in the realities of Africa, and you end up utilising things like thin > clients so that those PII's or sometimes even 486's can run modern day apps. > Of course they are never quite as fast as on a P4 but they look as fast to > users which is good enough -at least for compiled programs which do not abuse > all the available resources in the system but use only what they need leaving > the rest for the other users. I see > > In the end, the choice of a language is personal and not the least of your > concerns should be "what language does most of the people on this project > know the best", I think they stopped hiring people by most-common-language around here when google started stealing all the people that know python/ruby/lisp / write their own language/desktop/... or so and dislike java/c++-only programmers - because the latter are usually the taught-by-university-but-not-really-have-any-opinion-read-experience-yet people - and to see how chaotic and ugly java and c++ are, you really don't have to put in a lot of effort :) > but discounting OP because of what it wasn't in the 80's > is ... well uninformed silliness. Yes, assuming that stuff doesn't change over time is generally dumb. Actually everything changes, always. :) cheers, Danny _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
