["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.]
On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 17:00:36 +0100, Roy Schestowitz staggered into the
Black Sun and said:
> On Friday 26 August 2005 16:40, [Thomas Bartkus] wrote:
>> Far too many people take the narrow world they know and turn it into
>> a religion.
Yes, because for a lot of people, stuff they don't know about is scary.
That's like Psychology 101-level knowledge....
>> And then there are computer languages :-)
> Zeal in P/L
My brain appended an "I" to that and immediately said "WTF?".
> is probably to do with MS-only languages like VB and .NET (Direct X,
> MS 'HTML' and so forth), which still makes it a religious war over
> OSes.
I think it's more easily explained as "there are a bunch of people who
only know 1 language well, so they think that language is the best at
everything". With a little theory, it's relatively easy to show that
all Turing-complete languages can do the same things, but most people
who get involved in language flamewars haven't had any theory. A little
broader experience also tends to help. You can solve some problems with
10 lines of Perl or 300 lines of C; which is easier to code and
maintain? Other problems can't be solved very easily in Perl and can be
in C. Which language is better? Neither--they're both tools in a
toolbox and should be treated as such. You don't see people arguing
about whether wrenches are better than screwdrivers, after all.
> It is *languages* that sometimes stand in the way of interoperability,
> even when there is an able *and* willing programmer who wants to port
> an application.
? Did you mean "bindings for library functions" here? ISTR some evil
kludgy series of hacks that allowed you to call C and C++ functions from
Java. Creating some way to do that from $LANGUAGE would be a PITA, but
it'd be doable given enough time and effort. Of course, there are
various projects out there creating bindings for {Perl,Python,Ruby,
etcetera} for various Free libraries and toolkits. It's just nifty when
you can write a GTK+ application in Perl or Python, f'rexample.
--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL
|
|
