On 02/05/2016 11:31, Lyn Teyla wrote:
Stephen Barncard wrote:
obviously one hasn't been to a LC event lately. More white hair
and ponytails on old folks than an AES convention. The cool geeks
club.
I’ve got nothing against younger or older people at all, but:
Whenever I come across photos of LiveCode events, and see white hair
and baldness everywhere, it often makes me question my own sanity
regarding my choice of programming language.
What's wrong with baldness? :-D
And then, I start questioning the sanity of younger people, who
appear to _want_ to code using a non-English-like language, and
multiple different languages at that, if deploying to different
platforms.
Apparently, younger people, for some reason, don’t seem to want an
English-like language (some even going as far as to avoid such
languages as much as possible), or be able to use that same language
to create desktop, mobile, server and web apps.
Should we be learning all sorts of non-English-like programming
languages, just because everyone else is doing it, even though
they’re less intuitive to use?
I'll play Devil's advocate here.
All programming languages are the same. All are just a way of
expressing a set of instructions for a computation. Iterating over a
list is iterating over a list, whether you write it as:
-- LiveCode
repeat for each key tKey in tArray
write tArray[tKey] & return to stdout
end repeat
-- LiveCode Builder (fake syntax, we don't have
-- "encoded as" yet)
repeat for each element tItem in tList
write (tItem & "\n") encoded as "UTF-8" \
to the output stream
end repeat
# Python
for t_item in t_lst:
print(t_item)
;; Scheme
(for-each (lambda (x) (display x) (newline)) lst)
// Rust
for t_item in t_lst.iter() {
println!("{}", item)
}
// C++
for(auto && n : vec) {
std::cout << n << '\n';
}
Once you understand the _underlying_ principles of programming (and
you've probably learnt N programming languages), maybe learning an
(N+1)th language is simply a matter of figuring out how the language
goes about "telling the computer what to do" and then adding a link to
the language's standard library reference manual to your browser's
bookmarks bar.
Maybe LiveCode isn't more intuitive than any of the other many
programming languages that people use. In some ways, perhaps it is
_less_ easy to use because it's rather verbose, it doesn't have a very
expressive type system, and it lacks an extensive 3rd-party developer
ecosystem.
Maybe, if you look closely at the programming languages that "young
people" are choosing to use, the syntax is not an important criterion in
that choice.
Maybe if LiveCode fits your needs well, it makes sense to stick with it,
regardless of what's fashionable in the world of programming languages.
Peter
P.S. "Because everyone else is doing it" is not a good reason to do
something. However, it is a good reason to clearly understand why
you're not.
--
Dr Peter Brett <peter.br...@livecode.com>
LiveCode Open Source Team
LiveCode 2016 Conference: https://livecode.com/edinburgh-2016/
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