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Re: Gary's Recollections of Delta





Aron Insinga wrote:

> There are some things that appear to have been forgotten, or shunted off to
> a niche.  When I learned Java, I realized that it was the most productive
> and highest level language I'd used since BASIC-Plus or PL/I, excluding
> PERL.  I bet a lot of people have never used a language with decent string
> operations, if they use C, or they don't have a great C++ class library,
> and so don't know what they're missing, and would have trouble designing a
> String class (which is not to say that it is easy in any case, having
> worked on it for X3J16).

I'll second that. I used C/C++ for many years and finally learned Perl. Now
I've taken to putting Perl wrappers around many of our C++ libraries
(via SWIG) because Perl is so much faster to develop in - especially
for parsing ASCII files, job control, adding a quick interface (Tk), etc.
It's about time that improvements in computer speed allow programmers
to get back to high-productivity tools instead of high-efficiency tools.
(I still love C++, but I can write pages of Perl which will run correctly
the first time -- never in C!) Maybe Basic+ wasn't so bad after all? I
sure wrote some horrible code with it. IMO, Visual Basic is still pretty
bad when you want to write big apps, but maybe that's Microsoft-phobia
speaking...
--
Ralph Gonzalez
rgonzale@ibl.bm