Re: Latin, Shakespeare, and other irrelevant topics

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <952hmb$niq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article
>
<Pine.BSF.4.21.0101271915410.28283-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
>   Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
>
> > The Shakespeare worship

I have a question, and it even has a (slender) relevance to
Ada. Have you ever seen a Shakespeare play done by a really
good company? Perhaps not ... if not, then perhaps you are
making the same error that some people make when it comes
to Ada, dismissing it without really knowing much about it.

Going back to your question, about how I would react to an
art form I dislike, I can think of one, which is Heavy Metal
Rock (I don't dislike all Rock), but that means I don't listen
to it, which means I know nothing about it, which means that
I would not give any judgment on its worth.

My son Keith has really broad musical tastes (and is very
knowledgable -- he worked in the classical section of Tower
for a number of years). When he was in high school, and I
would arrive home, it was a toss up whether Mozart or some
variety of loud rock music (I don't even know the genre well
enough to know *exactly* what constitutes heavy metal :-)
Once I came home, and it was the latter, and when I asked
Keith to turn it down, he said "Dad! You have such narrow
musical tastes!"

When it comes to programming languages, it is amazing how
many people dismiss programming languages they know absolutely
nothing about. How many people do you know who in some sense
are experts in the PL field who don't know COBOL or VB, but
are quite sure that both these languages are junk.

Back to Shakespeare. It is one thing to say: "I really don't
appreciate Shakespeare, or understand what people see in him",
and quite another to say "Shakespeare is shallow" without
being a serious student of Shakespeare (no doubt there are
some who *are* serious students, and who would claim him to
be shallow -- their arguments would be interesting to listen
to).

Back to Programming Languages. It is one thing to say "I don't
really know language XXX, so I can't really make a judgment on
what it is good for", and quite another to say "language XXX
is a piece of junk" [without really knowing language XXX].

Gosh, an Ada relevance of sorts in this thread (Pascal,
if your news reader is still forcing you to actually read all
these messages, then you can find the magic word :-)

Robert



Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/