Ziggy told me told that Microsoft is trying to patent IsNot.
In Peter Coffee's blog about this I found this little gem:
One of the biggest boons to software productivity has been the advent of powerful scripting languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, and many others. I agree with German developer Falk Bruegmann when he says that "we should expect to see a trend from languages that put the main emphasis on efficiency to languages which put their emphasis on productivity and scalability... I expect dynamically typed languages traditionally used for scripting to be enhanced for better scalability by better package systems, better tools or improvements in the type system... Such "enhanced" scripting languages are well-positioned to take away market share from traditional system languages."
I was recently writing about something very similar. Basically, the closer you can express your program in terms of the problem domain, the more productive you become. As an example, I reduced a 14 line SQL script down to a one-line problem statement. If that one-line statement can be the program, we're doing well.
That is what dynamic languages are coming closer to achieving. By contrast, back in the 60s and 70s, you used to have to write your JCL (Job Control Language) in such a way as to describe the record structure of the file you were opening, how much space to allocate it, how much extra space could be allocated, etc. This was in the name of "efficiency." The more work the inexpensive programmer did, the less work the expensive computer had to do. While it's not always reasonable to sacrifice computer efficiency for programmer efficiency, now that computers are cheaper than programmers, forcing the programmer to do all of the grunt work seems silly.
Re:Computers versus Programmers
ziggy on 2004-11-23T02:52:47
Heh. Just wait until you start programming with macros or writing subs/methods that write subs/methods. Then you're cooking with gas.;-) But you'd better get crackin'. Microsoft'll have a patent on that as soon as the USPTO rubber stamps them.
