Slashdot Mirror
The Problem Of Developing
A reader writes "ZDNet News is running an editorial about the choice of programming languages for developers today. The author suggests that developers have been left with little choice because all of the current programming languages are essentially the same."
im not sure that something as "plagiaristic" as C# can be considered "different".
.NET may have originated from early Object Oriented Software, such as Logic Audio... so i wouldn't consider .NET innovative.
.NET Enterprise 2002 every day right now, so i think i can say these things.
.NET basically is so WELL DONE that it is the first time that all the languages are unified to such an extent, that they all seem the same.
hmm... as a matter of fact, pluggable ideas for
i use
the only conclusion that i have come to (on the subject of the article referenced here) is that
its true... they werent the same to begin with, but one super large company seems to think that merging them all together is a good idea.
hmmmm....
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Visual Studio.NET includes Visual C++, and it remains the most important of the products (I'm sure it irritates the VC team seeing the marketing droids out in force selling VB.NET and C#.NET when the C++ engine in Visual Studio.NET continues to be improved, with optimization enhancements that further extend its performance brilliance).
Example:
Look at some of the other languages that have been ported to the CLR. In every case, those languages have had to lose something important that made them different to fit the common dominator offered by the CLR. Microsoft has brought the notion of skins to programming indeed.
(emphasis mine)
What a gratuitous (and feeble) claim. The author obviously think that about 3 languages exists: C(and friends), Java and VB.
Some functionnal languages have been successfully ported to the CLR, and they didn't need to be amputated for that.
For example, Standard ML and Mercury. Both have been succesfully ported to the CLR without violence to those languages.
So, in conclusion, I agree that when you know only 3 procedural/OO languages you might be under the impression that all languages look alike.
Move along, nothing to see here.
cheers
I guess I'll have to tell my boss I can no longer do Perl scripting for him. And I suppose I'll have to stop writing the shareware game I'm working on until I have time to convert the existing Objective-C to C# - assuming that there will be a MacOS X C# runtime and IDE that I can use. And I suppose all of that C code I've written in the past will have to be junked by the people using it.
Oh, well. Another day, another stupid analyst.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
If you want an example of MS dropping a language, look at Visual FoxPro. Anyone remember FoxPro? MS is still officially "no comment" on the matter, I wish they would just come out and announce that it's dead.
.Net was even out. Are you saying there are no future versions in devlopment, or did you just miss that a new release came out?
Um, Visual Foxpro 7 was just released last year before
speaking of education, since when is "informative" spelled I-N-S-I-G-H-T-F-U-L?
I was just wondering if they changed that since I graduated from college.
;-)
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
large software companies want everyone to believe that C/C++ are completely obselete, to push new users towards their newer technologies. and once you've committed to using those technologies, you'll of course need to buy a copy of ms visual studio or something similar to take full advantage of it. no one makes money if developers use C/C++, vi, gcc, and gdb.
that being said, i don't think C/C++ is always the right way to go. it all comes down to picking the right tool for the job.
You're not completely wrong. All the classic ingredients of OOP -- messaging syntax, encapsulation, inheritance, etc. -- can be simulated in a non-OO language by consistent use of naming conventions, function-argument-order conventions, etc. In the end, it all reduces to machine code anyway, after all.
But a true OO language makes these things
easier, by providing special syntax for message passing, enforcing encapsulation, etc. I'd rather write:
somePerson.setName("Foo")
than:
person_setName(somePerson, "Foo")
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
Mate, Turing complete. As in, Alan Turing. As in the father of computing.
It was the "Great Pain" part that killed it. I too suffered through a few classes on that language and it simply boiled down to supply vs demand. The civilian sector saw no reason to learn Ada since other languages could accomplish the same functionality. As the era of Reaganomics went away and the infinite supply of government money for hiring contractors died, the contractors were forced to cater to customers other than DOD to stay alive. Everyone else was looking for C/C++ or Java (mid 90's) and so that's where the talent and training went. The DOD finally had to accept the fact that there weren't enough Ada supporting contractors left to support the language as a standard, so they instead moved to the "Commercial Off The Shelf" COTS line of thinking. Fortunately the contracting industry had basically settled on C/C++ as the language of choice, so we didn't have the myriad of languages you did back in the 80's.
I think a few DOD offices still try to push for Ada, but most have accepted defeat. All the new systems coming online in the USMC logistics community are now written in ANSI C.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Sorry guys, Perl is not where the money is at.
Strange, my wallet disagrees with you.
It's true a lot of in-house corporate software uses VB, etc., but a lot of other software (including software produced by major corporations and sold for a LOT of money, e.g. engineering software) doesn't. Like I said originally, it depends on what part of the software development world you look at.
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
Whether this claim has any merit or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
"I think a few DOD offices still try to push for Ada, but most have accepted defeat. All the new systems coming online in the USMC logistics community are now written in ANSI C. "
What a stupid decision. Ada is no harder than
C (almost easier in all cases), and provides so many more advantages. Takes a week to train people up to speed in Ada, and you get benefits such as decreased bug rates.
Sheesh!
> [Ada] is not at all dead or outdated. It was updated in 1995...
And the '0X version is under development right now.
> Its even going to be included in the gcc tool chain in v3.1.
FWIW, about two weeks ago I downloaded gcc 3.1 from the cvs snapshot and tried it out. I didn't have time to download/run the test suite, but it worked fine on several of my programs which I did try out. IIRC, the 3.1 branch was supposed to fork off a week or so ago, and the target release date is only a couple of months from now.
Also notice that the GNU Visual Debugger is written in Ada. It currently works for Ada, C, and C++, but is designed to handle additional languages as plugins.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade