[Tfug] Language choices

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, Chad,

--- Chad Woolley <thewoolleyman at gmail.com> wrote:

> I wrote a ton of REXX on the mainframe with I worked
> at IBM.  It was a nice little procedural scripting
> language (I never used Object REXX).
> I'm glad I don't use it anymore.  It's main
> shortcoming would be that it is an obscure language
> created and primarily used by IBM, with little 3rd
> party library support.

Not a valid criteria for me  :>  As long as the
language is consistent, relatively easy for others
to learn, has bounded execution behaviour, etc.

> If you are going to script anything in the 21st
> century, I'd strongly recommend Ruby, unless you 
> are on some platform that doesn't support it - and
> most should, if not natively then it's easy to build
> from source.

I don't work in a desktop environment.  So, what's
considered "easy" to support is often not as simple
to say.  Likewise, many popular/modern languages
draw heavily on other libraries on a system, etc.

For example, pull the disk out of your <blank>
machine,
boot your <blank> kernel via TFTP.  Load whatever
you need for Ruby and some <token> application.
Then, bring the network interface *down* (i.e. you
can't access anything else on a remote file server,
no disk to swap to, etc.).

*Now*, what's your resource footprint look like
while your <token> application is running?  Can
you do this in 1G of RAM?  512M?  256MB?  64M?
16M??  How about *4*M?

Sure, I have more than 4M available.  But, that
memory has to support *lots* of applications
running concurrently -- plus their "disk images",
etc.

> Ruby is clean, concise, well-designed, and best of
> all, object-oriented from the ground up.  It
supports
> blocks and closures.  It's designed to follow the
> principle of least surprise, and it reads
> very easily in english-like syntax (even though it
> was originally written by guy from Japan).

*Most* OO langages "read" terribly!  Lots of
superfluous punctuation mandated by the object
model (e.g., object.method).  And, all sorts of
oddball operators (e.g., &, ->, @, etc.).

Could you read your code to a *secretary* (non
computer literate) easily?

E.g., if you discount parens, LISP is quite readable
(though if you discard the parens, what the hell
is left?? :> ).  OTOH, C++, Java, etc. have tons
of punctuation sprinkled throughout.  It seems
like newer languages rely heavily on punctuation.
(contrast with something like COBOL  :>  )

> Theres a ton of 3rd-party libraries to
> support it, and an easy mechanism to auto-download
> them (RubyGems).

Not important for me.  :>  Unless, perhaps, they have
libraries to control motors, scan barcodes, etc.  :)

> You get the best of all worlds.

What about support for variable precision math?
Are there hooks for IPC built into the language?
(e.g., Limbo, REXX, etc.)  Or, does it rely on 
library support for this?

I'll have to look through the ruby package on my
NBSD box to see if there are "features" I could
discard to tweek the syntax -- or, if it is
hopelessly tied to the language definition
itself.  Maybe I'll run my proposed test (to
check resource footprint).  I'm not very
optimistic... :<

Thanks!
--don

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