Date   : Mon, 03 Apr 2006 09:22:59 +0100
From   : Andy Armstrong <andy@...>
Subject: Re: Basic & BBC Basic

On 2 Apr 2006, at 23:42, Jules Richardson wrote:
> The OO side of it seems to be a total disaster though. Shame there  
> isn't much of an alternative when it comes to server-side web stuff  
> (Perl's just complete spaghetti, ASP isn't portable etc.)

I'd say Perl's my favourite language - but I tend not to advocate it  
to anyone else. It's pretty trippy to be able to write stuff like this:

# Encode args as a line of CSV
sub csv {
     return '"' . join('","', map { (my $i = $_) =~ s/"/""/g; } @_) .  
'"';
}

but it's a guilty pleasure; a private indulgence. It's certainly not  
a suitable teaching language.

>> 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 do need to look into it (and without checking, I suspect it was  
> you who pointed me at the FUSE user-space Linux filesystem stuff  
> and corresponding Python code)

It might have been - I've been looking at FUSE lately. I forget though.

>> 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.
>
> Oh sure, they all need to evolve. I suppose the trick is in getting  
> the basic framework right such that things *can* be changed without  
> fundamentally "breaking" the language. That's where I don't like C+ 
> + as it seems it was built on some fundamental bad choices which  
> make it a nasty language to use for a lot of situations.

I really don't like C++ - it feels as if it's stolen the worst  
aspects of the languages that have influenced it. Objective C is nice  
but it's hard to do anything useful with it unless you're developing  
for Mac OS. Actually ObjC + Cocoa is lovely.

>> 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.
>
> Absolutely. But my experience was that for the 30-40% of the time  
> where thinking beyond the taught situations was needed, the current  
> crop of graduates just couldn't cope.

Indeed.

> It was as though when faced with something unknown they went into  
> meltdown and couldn't see how to tackle the situation. A company's  
> no good if it can only cope with 60% of any problem and then makes  
> a mess of the remaining 40% (which seems to be what's wrong with a  
> lot of software)

I guess across the industry it's probably more like 90/10 (cope/ 
can't) and it may be that companies can get by with a few real  
programmers and a bunch of people who can bolt stuff together. Dunno.

There really is a lot for a would be developer to learn these days -  
probably way more than you can reasonably cram into a CS course. I'd  
like to see a stronger culture of life long learning in the industry.  
I'm not talking about going on courses to learn about the latest API  
or whatever - I mean proper development of their craft.

>> 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.
>
> It's a nice idea - providing that efficiency, disk / memory  
> footprint etc. can be sacrificed. I suppose I just see "one size  
> fits all" solutions as being horribly wasteful!

Same here. Of course there's may be an element of us just being  
grizzled old curmudgeons who remember when every byte was sacred and  
haven't quite adapted to just how ludicrously cheap once scarce  
resources now are.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net