27 May
2020
27 May
'20
12:40 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
I don't know. There is a huge amount of tradition
and culture in
computing now, and as a result, few people seem to have informed,
relatively unbiased opinions. There hasn't been much real diversity in
decades.
25 or 30y ago, people discussed the merits of Smalltalk or Prolog or
Forth; now most people have never seen or heard of them, and it's just
which curly-bracket language you favour, or does your preferred
language run in a VM or is it compiled to a native binary.
Agreed. While I'm
much more favorably disposed towards C than you are,
the increasing homogeneity of almost all modern languages is
discouraging and, I think, detrimental to the field as a whole. Forth
and Smalltalk alike were eye-openers when I discovered them (and
Smalltalk in particular was a breath of fresh air, after I'd spent
years failing to ever really grok OOP with the likes of C++ and Java,)
because both presented genuinely *different* and beautifully
consistent ways to think about structuring and specifying a computer
program. These days, though, outside of deliberately jokey
ultra-esoteric languages, it's pretty much just a bunch of
domain-specific Java/Javascript knockoffs from horizon to horizon.
I am just surprised that this (to me) rather inelegant
design survived
and got to market, given what you've said about the same company's
ruthless drive for cost-cutting removed one PCB trace even though it
killed floppy-disk performance, or wouldn't use an extra ROM chip
because it was too expensive.
It seems inconsistent.
It's marketing - consistency there is a
non-consideration, if not
actively striven against. The whole saga with CP/M on CBM was a
boondoggle - the CP/M cart existed because business customers wanted a
CP/M add-in to run their spreadsheets and their whatnot, but it didn't
end up being a good fit for reasons already stated (slow CPU, slow
disk, 40-column only.) The 128 improved on those points, but not
nearly enough to become competitive with the advancements CP/M
machines had made in that time, and in the process wasted precious
man-hours and drove up the cost and complexity of the unit - and all
the while CP/M had been losing ground to MS-DOS in the business market
for years! But marketing promised it, so it had to happen... :/