[ale] Ale Inc.? (was RE: [ale] surviving sans work

[Joseph A Knapka]

Kevin Krumwiede wrote:
> 
> > And if it could, Java would be a bad choice, IMO (I say this with
> > several years of Java development experience). It's a horrible
> > language, well-marketed by Sun and hangers-on.
> 
> You really think so?  I initially learned to program with Apple BASIC,
> GW-BASIC, and QuickBASIC.  After years of therapy, I was able to learn C and
> C++.  I got terribly bogged down in the complexity of C++ and never became
> proficient with it.
>
> Then I learned Java, and my productivity took off.
> Java does have its limitations, and I realize I need to put C and Perl and
> some other things in my toolbox before every problem starts looking like a
> nail, so to speak... but I would never call Java a "horrible" language.
> First of all, it's easy to develop in.  You can knock out a simple and
> functional program as easily as you can a shell script.  I also think it
> would be a fantastic language for teaching -- far better than any kind of
> BASIC or Pascal or whatever it is they're using now.  (I know GSU uses Java
> for its "Introduction to Programming", but my girlfriend's prof teaches it
> like it's called "Introduction to Java", which probably is just as bad as
> teaching BASIC.)
> 
> What say ye to these charges? :-)

Well, just to establish my right to have an opinion...
I learned programming on a TI-59 calculator, then went on
to TRS-80 BASIC, then TurboBASIC. Had IBM 360 assembly and
PL/1 classes in college, remember nothing. Learned Lisp,
Pascal, FORTRAN, Prolog and C (the last two very well) in
grad school, spent a year writing Prolog professionally. Got
hired by a C/FORTRAN shop and learned C++ there. I really
liked C++ for its abstraction capabilities, and was very into
static type analysis as the Foundation of All That Is Good
for a couple of years. Thought Java was incredibly cool
until I'd written about 25000 lines of it. Did a couple
of small consulting jobs in Perl, and maintained my
employer's proprietary hacks of CVSWeb (in Perl). More
recently, I've picked up Tcl/Tk, which made a lot of the
stuff I did in Java a lot easier; Python, which made a lot
of the stuff I did in Tcl a lot easier; Intel assembly,
which made understanding the Linux kernel a lot easier;
6811 assembly, which made puttering around with robots
possible, if not exactly easy; Forth, which made
a lot of the stuff I did in assembly a lot easier;
and Javascript, which probably has an actual use I have
not yet discovered. Sometimes I really miss the TI-59.

Every language is horrible for some purposes, and some
are horrible for more purposes than others. The more
languages you know, the more horrible the horribler ones
seem. Java and Perl are among the horriblest.

My opinion, of course :-)

Cheers,

-- Joe
"I should like to close this book by sticking out any part of my neck
 which is not yet exposed, and making a few predictions about how the
 problem of quantum gravity will in the end be solved."
 --- Physicist Lee Smolin, "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity"

---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.