Re: Gratuitous bashing ?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

O.K. I'll accept that story. However, that sounds more like Necessity being
the Mother of Invention. (Or is it Necessity Is The Mother Of Futile Dodges
:-) In either case, it doesn't sound like somebody said: "Since we have to
program STBs, let's design a language that is suited to STB software
development..." That seems different than "Lets use a subset of C because we
are having trouble with full-up C...  Hey wait a minute! This is a new
language!!!!"

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

>
> According to a Sun marketing video, a group was assigned
> to develop a set top box or something.  This part of the
> video was very unclear.  I had the impression that it was
> something like WebTV.
>
> Anyway, they were working in C, and kept having problems
> traced to certain kinds of mistakes.  So they invented
> a language in which you could not make those kinds of mistakes.
>
> Joy or Gosling (I forgot which, they were both in the video)
> held up a book on C with lots of stuff lined out and said
> something like, "Basically, we just went through here and
> deleted everything that was causing us problems."
>
> Then somebody else saw it and thought, "Hey, we could sell this!"
>
> Really.  I saw it.  It really was like that.  Honest.
>
> OK, my bias may have colored my report a little--but not much!
>
> --
> Wes Groleau
> http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau