> > I've written in many languages in the past 10 years-- VFP, > > VB/VBScript, ASP, PHP, VC++, VC#, Java, etc.-- they're all mostly the > > same. Most programmers can basically get the idea of what code is > > doing by reading it as long as descriptive commands/method names are > > used and no complex math/arithmetic(i.e. pointer arithmetic in c/c++).
> > To a real software engineer, the language is irrelevant-- it's the > > design principles that are key. > Only to a certain extent. Try as I might, I just can't think in > Perl. I can manually translate it into something I can understand, > but I can't read it. Lisp is sorta the same way - it just doesn't > click in my brain. Any language that adds a ton of punctuation-type > stuff or non-standard symbols (think of Perl/PHP's use of a period > for concatenation) will not be one that I will ever be fluent in. Yes, there are quirks and funkiness in some languages-- that hinder their proliferation, honestly(such as lisp and to some extent perl; I agree in both cases). There are also some languages such as assembly(is assembler officially a language?) which aren't of the same level that are just not the same. > There are also lots of other things that tend to continuously trip > up development. One thing that most VFP developers love is the > ability to create variables as you need them - no need to declare > them first. Any language that requires that is a PITA, IMO. Sure, > there are tools to automate that process, but if a tool can do it, > why can't the language itself? As in never declaring the variable and having it implicitly a public variable? That's just messy and I'm glad that many other languages don't support that. As for having to declare variables first in the method/function, I haven't seen many modern languages that still do that. I know in c++, c#, etc., you can declare variables farther down in the code-- including inside code blocks which actually is more efficient at times(why allocate memory for a variable that's never used in most cases, for example). -- Derek _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
