Re: C++ usage (was Re: ada and robots)

[jsa@alexandria.organon.com (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <Pine.SGI.3.95.970624211546.29470A-100000@shellx.best.com> Brian Rogoff <bpr@shellx.best.com> writes:

> > is not a rational choice.  The really odd thing is that IME I've seen
> > people actually admit this was true (that an alternative would
> > actually make more sense all around), but then choose C++ anyway
> > "because that is what is being used in the industry".  That's
> > basically irrational.
> 
> In other words, people who had the choice admit that they made what they 
> thought (before they committed) was the wrong choice? 

That is correct.  But, as someone else pointed out, they would not say
that outright except among themselves.


> I'd be curious about the management/economic issues you cite. The
> more ammo the better.

Simply this: it was _clear_ that a) things would be done better and
cheaper if X were used _and_ b) that there would be happier and more
enthusiastic employees as they wanted to use X, understood why X would
make their life better, knew X (more did than not), and liked X.


> Understandable that they might feel that way, as programming in Lisp is 
> far different from programing in Ada. Lisp environments tend to really 
> support an exploratory style of programming (hacking ;-) which can be 
> quite useful at times. 

Exactly.  We use it here for much of our exploratory proof of concept
and proto-type work.


> OCAML, which is a member of the ML family of languages, is an impure  
> functional language, like Scheme, which is statically typed, has a module 
> system supporting separate compilation, and an object system. Like SML, 
> you don't have to explicitly type variables, as the compilers do type 
> inference. For long lived code, I'm not so sure this is good, since
> explicit types provide documentation for dumber programmers like me. OTOH, 
> combined with an interpreter, it feels like an Ada-esque Lisp with its 
> static typing. See http://pauillac.inria.fr/ocaml/ for details. 

Kewl.  I'll check it out.  Thanks for the tip.


> > Well, OK you got me.  Still, in general, people wouldn't actually
> > suggest using Perl for any sort of large scale programming - would
> > they??
> 
> Yes. I have talked to members of several commercial projects which use 
> Perl for large scale programming. One of them was switching to Java because 
> the Perl code had become unmaintainable in their opinion.  

And people wonder why software is in such an execrable state.
Criminey...

/Jon

-- 
Jon Anthony
OMI, Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
"Nightmares - Ha!  The way my life's been going lately,
 Who'd notice?"  -- Londo Mollari