Re: License to Steal

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com>]

Kent Paul Dolan wrote
>A very interesting thesis project for one of your grad
>students, Richard, would be to study what it is that
>makes a programming language able to grab mindshare
>despite being essentially a hacker's toy like C++,
>TCL, Perl, or Python, to name ones familiar to me,
>while for conceptually adequate other programming
>languages, like Ada, even offering to force them down
>the programmer's throats at gunpoint fails.

TCL is failing these days. Cameron Laird recently in his column lamented
that TCL books had stopped selling. Probably means that perl and python can
do the job now.

TCL was popular/tolerated because of TK. Once the more usable (compared to
TCL) programming languages got something usable, TCL had no useful life
anymore and is being discarded. It will not be missed.

>One well known and fairly major clue might be that
>Larry Wall is a linguist by training.  Does he know
>something the Ada team should have considered about
>how the user wants to _think of_ a language?

I would not be surprised if you are right. I think he made some interesting
constructs in perl. E.g. I really like "unless" because it allows me to
specify exactly what I want to express, when I use it.

Greetings,