On 20/02/09 10:11, John Little wrote: > > On Feb 18, 4:48 am, Tony Mechelynck<[email protected]> > wrote: > >> If someone, be he named Dijkstra or >> anything else, tries to tell me in what languages I "may" program and to >> put his "laws" to execution, I shall treat him as an oppressor. You >> Vimmers be the judges of whether the years I spent programming mostly in >> COBOL (and some in assembly language) crippled my mind. > > Having suffered the same fate, but more importantly seen the crippling > effects on others, I must allow that he (Dijkstra) has, or had, a > point. Perhaps I have a "that which did not kill me, made me stronger" > attitude, but "crippling" is not too string a word for some former > colleagues, particularly cobol-74. > > Regards, John
My "political opinion" is that you're free to cripple your _own_ mind as much as you want, as long as you don't do harm to _others_. So the criminal offence, if any (which remains to be seen), might be _teaching_ COBOL or _requiring_ its use, but not _using_ it. BTW, I didn't notice any crippling effect of COBOL-60 (or of whatever standard we were following in 69 or so) on my colleagues' minds. I'd say Dijkstra had the parochial view of a C-only programmer, and when I want to produce nice-looking reports, I'd say COBOL wins hands down over C every time. If you say COBOL-74 was different from "my" COBOL in crippling terms, I have to defer to you. Was COBOL-74 freeform already? Or was it only the result of the "structured programming" fashion wave which tended to eliminate all GO TO statements from COBOL, even those targeting the EXIT paragraph at the end of a called subroutine? "My" COBOL was fixed-form and with-GO-TO, but we had a head programmer who strongly disliked "spaghetti style" and enforced a "house style" which was quite readable IMHO. Best regards, Tony. -- You need no longer worry about the future. This time tomorrow you'll be dead. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
