Re: Latin, Shakespeare, and other irrelevant topics

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

In article <954e7d$8q61@news.cis.okstate.edu>,
  dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org wrote:
>. If you require someone to know a language inside
> and out before having an opinion on it, only the people who
will have
> an opinion on it are those who love it enough to spend all
that time
> learning it.


You do not have to "love" a language to spend time learning
it. Indeed the idea of expending such a deep emotion as love
on some technical artifical language is a bit sad ....

If have NOT learned a language, then you don't know it. If
you don't know it, then you really can't comment on it
in an informed manner, and what happens is that people tend
to borrow their pseudo-opinions from what they have heard.

So for example, lots of people will dismiss COBOL as too
verbose, which overall is plain technical nonsense (when I
gave a talk at Berkeley on COBOL, I spent time addressing
this silly issue just because so many people are under
this illusion -- we took several standard algorithms, and
programmed them in several languages, and COBOL came out
as short or shorter than the competition, both in characters
and token count :-) Of course this is a totally uninteresting
issue anyway, and has nothing to do with the things that make
COBOL an interesting language :-)

With regard to assembly language, you cannot have an opinion
on AL from a language point of view unless you have reasonable
working knowledge of an AL.

It is really a rule of all honest intellectual approaches that
you cannot offer opinions on things you don't know about. If
you have not read Dickens, then you do NOT go selling other's
opinions of Dickens as though they were your own!


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