4 ms·

>The comparisons you've made are flippant ones without much serious weight to them. I find them mighty fine comparisons. He didn't want to convey the same lang

>The comparisons you've made are flippant ones without much serious weight to them. I find them mighty fine comparisons. He didn't want to convey the same language features -- he wanted to convey languages that draw similar kinds of criticism today and serve similar functions.

eropple 14y ago
So, none of them? Again, never used PL/I, so I can't roll on that one, but I know guys who have been doing FORTRAN since the seventies and that culture and outlook bears little resemblance to the C community. Java's community is not nearly as buttoned-up and business-centric as COBOL's was (even the oh-so-wise "scripting people" aside); COBOL had literally-literally no other significant use case. And PHP, for all its many warts, is viewed as a language you use to ship products, novice or no. Actual products that people use, no less. The first time I can think of BASIC being readily usable for that was in the nineties. They don't draw similar criticisms at all, unless you take the Djikstra paper literally (and not even Djikstra took the Djikstra paper literally). It's a chance to slag on languages rather than a way to move the conversation forward; he challenged me to make better comparisons and my point is that the number of factors that exist today are so much greater that a comparison will fail. To understand the Djikstra paper you have to understand the languages, not short-circuit a poor comparison. (And I do know all of them except PL/I, which sort of pains me, but...)
- btilly 14y ago
  They don't draw similar criticisms at all... I actually have heard similar criticisms to the ones that Dijkstra made of every one of the modern equivalents. For similar reasons. And I believe that my comparison touches on why each of those criticisms is paralleled. I freely admit, though, that the weakest parallel is to Java. Programmers who are not enamored of deep object hierarchies despise those designs when Java programmers try to implement them in any language. But love of deep object hierarchies is not unique to Java (though it does tend to be extreme there). Nor is Java as crippled as COBOL. As for COBOL and other use cases - I would be willing to bet large sums that it would have had many other use cases had the people programming in it had access to computers that could run it for a reasonable price. And finally, I did not post that comparison to slag on languages. I posted it to provide context for Dijkstra's quote. In fact I, personally, have spent a lot of my professional life programming in Perl - which is one of the languages that I offered up for criticism. And I freely admit that the criticism is not entirely unfounded.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >So, none of them? Again, never used PL/I, so I can't roll on that one, but I know guys who have been doing FORTRAN since the seventies and that culture and outlook bears little resemblance to the C community. Java's community is not nearly as buttoned-up and business-centric as COBOL's was (even the oh-so-wise "scripting people" aside); COBOL had literally-literally no other significant use case. And PHP, for all its many warts, is viewed as a language you use to ship products, novice or no. Actual products that people use, no less. The first time I can think of BASIC being readily usable for that was in the nineties. Do I have to repeat that it's not about them being the SAME, but merely an equivalent for the modern era? The PHP analogy here is the novice targeted/available everywhere/easily run part. The Java analogy is the enterprisey, business, all serious part. The C analogy is the made to run fast but too low level and too concerned with control/low level speed over proper abstraction stuff. Etc etc.

eropple 14y ago

So, none of them? Again, never used PL/I, so I can't roll on that one, but I know guys who have been doing FORTRAN since the seventies and that culture and outlook bears little resemblance to the C community. Java's community is not nearly as buttoned-up and business-centric as COBOL's was (even the oh-so-wise "scripting people" aside); COBOL had literally-literally no other significant use case. And PHP, for all its many warts, is viewed as a language you use to ship products, novice or no. Actual products that people use, no less. The first time I can think of BASIC being readily usable for that was in the nineties. They don't draw similar criticisms at all, unless you take the Djikstra paper literally (and not even Djikstra took the Djikstra paper literally). It's a chance to slag on languages rather than a way to move the conversation forward; he challenged me to make better comparisons and my point is that the number of factors that exist today are so much greater that a comparison will fail. To understand the Djikstra paper you have to understand the languages, not short-circuit a poor comparison. (And I do know all of them except PL/I, which sort of pains me, but...)

btilly 14y ago
They don't draw similar criticisms at all... I actually have heard similar criticisms to the ones that Dijkstra made of every one of the modern equivalents. For similar reasons. And I believe that my comparison touches on why each of those criticisms is paralleled. I freely admit, though, that the weakest parallel is to Java. Programmers who are not enamored of deep object hierarchies despise those designs when Java programmers try to implement them in any language. But love of deep object hierarchies is not unique to Java (though it does tend to be extreme there). Nor is Java as crippled as COBOL. As for COBOL and other use cases - I would be willing to bet large sums that it would have had many other use cases had the people programming in it had access to computers that could run it for a reasonable price. And finally, I did not post that comparison to slag on languages. I posted it to provide context for Dijkstra's quote. In fact I, personally, have spent a lot of my professional life programming in Perl - which is one of the languages that I offered up for criticism. And I freely admit that the criticism is not entirely unfounded.
pretoriusB 14y ago
>So, none of them? Again, never used PL/I, so I can't roll on that one, but I know guys who have been doing FORTRAN since the seventies and that culture and outlook bears little resemblance to the C community. Java's community is not nearly as buttoned-up and business-centric as COBOL's was (even the oh-so-wise "scripting people" aside); COBOL had literally-literally no other significant use case. And PHP, for all its many warts, is viewed as a language you use to ship products, novice or no. Actual products that people use, no less. The first time I can think of BASIC being readily usable for that was in the nineties. Do I have to repeat that it's not about them being the SAME, but merely an equivalent for the modern era? The PHP analogy here is the novice targeted/available everywhere/easily run part. The Java analogy is the enterprisey, business, all serious part. The C analogy is the made to run fast but too low level and too concerned with control/low level speed over proper abstraction stuff. Etc etc.