On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 03:12:58PM +0100, Robin Houston wrote:
> I don't find that enormously convincing as a reason, though.
> You may have noticed that it's possible to write obfuscated
> Perl programs ;)
No, I've only over seen pleasant, readable perl code posted to this
list.
> C++ is also pretty bad in that respect (I still don't *quite*
> believe that overloadable typecasting isn't a joke...), and
> is pretty popular...
I didn't realise that you could overload typecasting. Wow.
I still remember an article about C++ templating being a turing complete
language in it's own right or something weird. This isn't it, but is
entertaining anyway:
http://www.annexia.org/freeware/cpptemplates/
> I suppose one reason is that in order to be popular, a language
> has to syntactically resemble C to make it easier for existing
> programmers to learn.
Well, look what that did for Java. And look what it will do for C#.
It's a lot easier to tempt people away when it takes less effort for
them. To use the canonical counter-example, take lisp. How many people
have been scared off it by how much it *doesn't* look like anything you
already knew?
-Dom (elisp's my limit, I'm afraid)
