Date   : Sun, 02 Apr 2006 18:48:03 +0100
From   : Andy Armstrong <andy@...>
Subject: Re: Basic & BBC Basic

On 2 Apr 2006, at 17:40, Jules Richardson wrote:
> Agreed. BASIC's too unstructured, Pascal is a little too behind the  
> times, and C++ is about the worst example of an OO language that  
> it's possible to come up with (not that the competition does much  
> better - Java's one of the few languages that's been designed to be  
> both OO and 'clean' from the ground up)

Java's not quite so clean these days...

> Note I'm not saying that an OO language is any kind of holy grail -  
> there are plenty of cases where a procedural language like C might  
> be better, or assembler for low-level work.
>
> It's a shame that the PHP designers made such a total mess of it,  
> and I get the impression that Python isn't a lot better -  
> incremental design in stages rather than an effort to get things  
> right from the start... :-(

PHP is a bag of arse. Python is a much nicer language. And 'getting  
things right from the start' is a lot easier (I mean a LOT easier)  
said than done when it comes to programming languages. I'd rather use  
a language that evolves in response to changing user requirements  
than one that was designed 'right' (for any given boneheaded value of  
'right') at the start.

> On the "only teaching Windows to students" side of things, I get  
> the impression that full CS courses aren't any better these days -  
> it's all about bolting other people's bits of software together in  
> graphical environments rather than teaching people the basics of  
> how to actually *write* stuff :-(

Well of course that's what the great majority of people in the  
industry do these days too - so if you consider skills training  
desirable those are the skills people will need. One way of looking  
at it is that the world needed more programmers but teaching people  
to program to a decent standard was a bit hard - so we redefined  
'programming' to make it easier. I imagine that in absolute terms  
there are probably more really good programmers today than there were  
twenty years ago - it's just that they form a smaller proportion of  
the profession as a whole.

> Maybe the whole industry will just implode in a few years time due  
> to lack of talent?

Doubt it. Although not being able to ship Vista will certainly hurt MS.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net