GNOME and high-level languages
Posted May 12, 2005 14:37 UTC (Thu) by
ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to:
GNOME and high-level languages by socket
Parent article:
A new Harmony Project
"Our strength comes with and partly because of a diversity of ideologies related to programming languages."
Really? From here it looks as if each of these ideologies saps our strength. Whether it's built-in garbage collection, or object orientation, "there's more than one way to do it", "lambda the ultimate, or "builds and does", we are the poorer for being locked into it, even if only in a single project. The best that might be said about a diversity of them is that it may undermine allegiance to any one of them. Even then, we are led to believe that anything common to all the languages we know is god-given.
We are better off with pragmatic languages. Survey the programs on your favorite distribution, and you'll find (in order) C, C++, a few in Perl, fewer in Python. Java is largely confined to programs for people who are already obliged (by corporate diktat?) to use it, or write it. These languages rule not because they're especially good at anything particular, but because they don't pretend to know better than we do what we're trying to do: C, because it doesn't pretend to know much of anything; C++, because it is happy to get out of the way; Perl, because it's all over the place.
(
Log in to post comments)