Craig Harpel <······@mitre.org> writes:
>...back to the dark ages of FORTRAN and COBOL and now C because they
>are "established", even though they are pathetic languages when it
>comes to productivity and, especially in the case of C, unreadable.
>... Hence the new generation of hackers as opposed to computer
>scientists. It is reasoning ... (or lack thereof) that is prevalent
>today. The new hackers can't see the backward evolution in computer
>languages that C is dragging us toward...
I didn't want to join in until I had something specific to say, but I
do want to make known my 100% agreement with and appreciation of your
commentary. It reflects exactly what I think of the current computing
"state of the art". IMHO, we are undergoing a Dark Age of
computational technology. Fortunately, a continuing undercurrent of
use of progressive languages like Lisp and Rexx survives; hopefully it
will last until the rest of the world finally wakes up to the barren
promise of "portability" and "productivity" foisted on us by the
UNIX/C community. At that moment, there will be a Renaissance led by
the faithful. Fight on, because we will prevail in the end...
- Steve Bacher
- MVS and LISP systems programmer and REXX hacker
- Draper Laboratory