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Dumbing Down Programming?
RunRevKev writes "The unveiling of Revolution 4.0 has sparked a debate on ZDNet about whether programming is being dumbed down. The new version of the software uses an English-syntax that requires 90 per cent less code than traditional languages. A descendant of Apple's Hypercard, Rev 4 is set to '...empower people who would never have attempted programming to create successful applications.' ZDNet reports that 'One might reasonably hope that this product inspires students in the appropriate way and gets them more interested in programming.'"
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SoftwareEngineering/BrooksNoSilverBullet.html
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Reply to myself
Just looked at the portfolio of their consulting bussiness; they use their own language only for the simple bits and use other languages for the interresting stuff. Other projects they don't even use their own language at all.
Says enough to me.
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Well. Not the "failure to perform according to specs directly", but the results that may cause.
I did program PLCs for a while, and if I messed up the emergency stop procedure in an obvious way, and someone would have died as a result, I might have faced jail time for reckless homicide or involuntary manslaughter. Although I have heard only a few cases where there where actual convictions, and most of those were placed on probation instead of actually going to jail, like in the case of this electrician.
In the case of the Therac-25 incidents, there were too many contributing factors to really pin down the problem to one person. The person who originally wrote the software wrote it for the Therac-20, where it didn't cause any problems because of additional hardware interlocks, so technically the software worked on the "machine" it was written for. So the cause for the incident was not an obvious one, like using a not suitable language for the task.
It is a joke...its code runs so slow. I was happy not to be using VB but soon realized that VB is at least reasonably quick. It makes sense that the creators don't use it...anyone capable of creating a language is perfectly capable of writing in a better language.
It could be good for gui prototyping...it made very fast gui interfaces that were fully interactive and you could actually extend it pretty far. It just ran so slow that I can't see any benefit for using it in a professional environment. The extra time your users will have to spend waiting on the program would far outweigh the time/money it would take to hire someone to do it right (or even VB-right)
Bottles.
It doesn't really matter in the web as 90% of the time is spent hitting the database.
Depends on the application. Wikipedia is much more CPU-bound than database-bound. Look at the database (db*) vs. application (srv*) servers lists here: there are at least five times as many app servers as DB servers, at a quick glance. A typical request that hits the backend spends (IIRC) tens of milliseconds in the database, hundreds in PHP. Try formatting 500 or 5000 rows of a table when each one takes 1 ms – because yes, that happens when you try writing nice abstract formatting stuff in PHP.
The website I administer is also much more CPU- than database-bound. Generating the front page of the forums is 602 ms, with only 14 ms in MySQL and the rest in PHP. This is a >20G database, by the way.
I really don't see how any typical web app could spend more than a few tens of milliseconds per request at the database, unless it's poorly written (too much/too little normalization, bad indexes, etc.). But it's very easy to do hundreds of ms of pure computation in a slow language like PHP, even if your code is well-written. Are most web apps really DB-bound? I just haven't seen it, personally.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin