········@crl.com (Joe English) writes:
| I thought Ousterhout's paper was a terrific piece of marketing.
And why not? He's had years of solid results with a good product, and
wants people to know about it.
| the paper certainly has flaws -- the failure to even mention
| Lisp and Scheme (both of which have all the qualities he
| cites as desirable in a scripting language)
What would be the point of mentioning them? Lisp's reputation for
inefficiency and immiscibility with other langauges would just scare
away people who would otherwise be turned on to a good idea.
With a mighty <··············@galapagos.cse.psu.edu>,
········@galapagos.cse.psu.edu.NO-SPAM uttered these wise words...
> What would be the point of mentioning them? Lisp's reputation for
> inefficiency and immiscibility with other langauges would just scare
> away people who would otherwise be turned on to a good idea.
If myths about "efficiency" - or the lack of it - were could have this
effect, then VB would be dead. Actually, it's far from dead, even if a
few people might wish it were otherwise.
Note that I have no strong feelings for or against VB. It's just a
tool, and it appears to work well enough to please large numbers of
people. The "efficiency" issue only seems to matter to people who want
to tell you that something "can't be used for X", where X is some app
domain that either doesn't necessarily depend on any great quality of
efficiency, or is so specialised that few people will care.
The same is true for Lisp, and at least a dozen other languages. There
are even people who'll tell you how unsuitable C++ is for certain
tasks. As Bill House said, go figure.
My attitude is simple: use whatever works for you. The details should
be the business of only you, and whoever pays for your time. Ideally,
even they should take no interest in what you use, but this isn't the
case for all of us. This is what I mean by "whatever works for you".
--
<URL:http://www.wildcard.demon.co.uk/> You can never browse enough
Martin Rodgers | Programmer and Information Broker | London, UK
Please remove the "nospam" if you want to email me.