11 Feb
2010
11 Feb
'10
4:13 p.m.
From: Ray Arachelian
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 11:01 AM
Ian King wrote:
> This is probably why I rarely get involved in
debates about programming
> languages - unless the subject is COBOL, which I think is an abomination,
One of my IM statuses is this "Learning COBOL is
like seeing a plush
Cthulhu and petting it before you sign up for the class, but when you
get there, you actually meet the real thing, in the flesh, awakened and
hungry."
Nope, I didn't listen, I thought "Nah,
couldn't be THAT bad." Boy was I
wrong. :-)
Oh, come on. For the problem domain for which it was designed, COBOL is very
good. PL/I improves on it if you're a FORTRAsh programmer, but not much.
> or Java, which is something you drink, not code
in. -- Ian
Or a place to visit.
I've recently taken a liking to Lua. Pretty
decent for what it is.
Nice and small too. Though I've not done anything with Smalltalk, I do
like it, though coming from C, I do find the syntax a bit weird.
Personally, I wish that ANSI X3J13 had chosen Symbolics' New Flavors over
XEROX PARC's LOOPS as its OO model, but both work fine, and are real object
models. (My first exposure to OOP actually *was* Smalltalk, so all those C
based systems feel odd to me.) I already knew Lisp before I saw any OOP.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/