Programmers and languages

jplindstrom on 2003-04-15T21:42:03

Ovid wrote:
An individual Perl programmer can generate bad code so fast that there might be a lot of damage to undo, but the same programmer working in Java will have certain classes of damage that are difficult to have

Someone once said:

Perl is great for great programmers Java is great for average programmers

Actually, that was me saying that but I was quoting someone :)

I still would like to take the time to learn Java. And Smalltalk. And some kind of Lisp.

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I wish ...

Ovid on 2003-04-15T22:00:40

That I knew Java much better. While I've heard before that there are certain classes of problems that Java tends to eliminate, I don't know much about them. Certainly compile-time exceptions help. Disallowing multiple inheritence might be a benefit as would the cleaner OO model (can't diddle the fiddly bits on the inside of the object). Other than that, I'm not sure. I'm going to have to dig into this more.

Speaking of Lisp

inkdroid on 2003-04-15T22:33:35

Lisp devotee Paul Graham has a new essay on his website entitled The Hundred-Year Language. It's basically a text version of they keynote he gave at Pycon, reported earlier by ziggy. It's a really interesting article looking at the long term evolution of computer languages, and how important it is to be using languages that have a long term viability. After reading Damian's article in the latest Linux Magazine, it really seems like Perl is headed in the direction that Paul Graham is talking about.