G T Smith wrote:
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Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Thursday 01 May 2008 07:46, G T Smith wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Thursday 01 May 2008 00:36, Sam Clemens wrote:
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Randall Schulz How legible a bit of code is really down to the programmer not the language the code is written in. ... Not entirely. And in my experience, most programmers are absolutely lousy graphic artists and write ugly, unreadable code.
I would agree with the former (and the converse.. most graphics artist are lousy programmers). However, I do think in the latter you incorrect (or unlucky), if you in any form of collaborative project and you collaborators cannot make head or tail of your code *you* have the problem. Even if you are the sole author and there is any chance you have to go back to it at a former date it is a good idea to try and make in comprehensible, (it is a bit embarrassing as going back to something and wondering who the idiot was who wrote this, knowing the idiot was yourself).
Asking about standards in this realm is meaningless. None of these languages are standardized, not BASH, not Perl, not Python, not Ruby and not Groovy. But they're all real, powerful, supported and actively maintained languages. They're all well enough defined for the purposes to which they're put. (Well, I'm still harping on the G2One people to document and specify Groovy better, but they're overworked, it seems.)
Probably not formally, BASH, Perl, and Python have a community which maintain the primary interpreter and hence implicitly the formal spec. (Dunno about Groovy..., though the OpenOffice scripting component suffer greatly but the rather poor documentation). Javascript does have a formal standard.
The first thing I ask about a new language is does it address something which currently is not being done well by current languages. C++ extends C to give objects, D is attempting to extend C++ so dependence on STL for certain constructs is less of an issue. Java creates a network orientated multi-platform programming model. Python does address the rather clever and obscure kludge that gives Perl objects, (but as far as I can see little else). Perl 6 is supposed to adopting a similar object definition model to that of Python, but AFAIK that is not going to happen soon. PHP addresses the complexity of integration of Perl::DBI and Perl::CGI for web design work by giving a simpler model (but unfortunately handing the design issue to some that have little awareness of Web security). Ruby as far as I can work out is a fashion statement...
Mono, VB, .NET and C# is a finger in throat moment... :-)
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