[Novalug] I am thinking of a programming language - Can you name it?

Subba Rao castellan2004-novalug@yahoo.com
Fri Oct 30 17:03:56 EDT 2009


The long threads of discussion of different programming languages is interesting.  If the end product is an enterprise wide client server application, then a couple of languages like C/C++ for the Client side and SQL for the Server would solve the project needs of the company.

The Web 2.0 with Rich Internet Applications, you are forced to learn a lot of languages/scripting tools to acheive a "little".  When I say "little" I mean these applications are like movie previews.  Great until the next preview shows up.  It seems to be more entertaining but little is achieved for the Enterprise wide needs.  The hype on these Web 2.0 tools is too high.  It reminds of the Internet hype in the mid 90's when utility companies got into the ISP business.  Sad but true.

Some of these languages pop up on the grid and then disappear.  For example, the older versions of Slackware would install "expect" interpreter by default.  The newer version of Slackware offers "expect" as an optional install.

Although learning a programming language is not difficult, it certainly will not guarantee the longevity and support for the language and supporting libraries.  Choose the languages you want learn wisely.

Just my .02 cents/euros or whatever.

Cheers,

Subbarao


On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:59:51PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Paul D. Bain <paulbain@pobox.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> >        A language's memory usage or speed in execution are no longer terribly
> > important. DRAM is cheap and CPU speeds are continuing to increase apace
> > (Moore's law). Basically, programmers look for tools that tend to
> 
> I can't really agree; sadly.
> 
> I tried thinking that way: "My time is more valuable than the
> computer. It can crunch while I get a drink, or overnight and if I
> saved 10 minutes coding then that would be a good win."
> 
> Yet, even for one off programs that I would only run once or a few
> times I've found this to be untrue for the interpreted loosely typed
> high level languages which are currently in vogue:   They aren't just
> a few percent slower, they aren't even half or a quarter of the speed.
> 

  I can't speak to all of the dynamic/small/interpreted languages,
but Tcl and Perl both support on-the-fly compiled "C" code to be
merged in.  The Tcl version (and perhaps perl) will archive the compiled
code and just load it next time the app is run.

  This use of the 80/20 rule (80% of your time is spent running 20% of
your code) give a big win in development time - you don't need to worry
about C level GUI and large control structures when you're writing the
main control loops, but you get the speed of "C" for those nasty little
bits like encrypting, compression/decompression, image analysis, etc.

  Back-inna-dark-ages, I used to embed hand-assembled Z80 code in my
BASIC programs using various tricks with the same results - faster to
develop than pure assembly and faster runtime than pure BASIC.

  Clif
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