🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1996Apr12.000409.29727@alw.nih.gov>, johnk@spasm.niddk.nih.gov
(John Kuszewski) wrote:

> In article <dbell-1104960125190001@wholder2.cts.com>, dbell@shvn.com
(Doug Bell) writes:
> |> What are those circles which you care about?  Probably the one's who's
> |> members who spend 'countless hours' theorizing about why all those
> |> programmers using sticks and rocks (e.g. assembly, C, C++, insert any
> |> widely adopted language here), rather than those using the elegant and
> |> refined tools of the sophisticates (e.g. Smalltalk, Lisp, Prolog, insert
> |> any language rarely used for commercial applications here) ARE PRODUCING
> |> ALL THE PRODUCTS!
> 
> You're displaying your ignorance here.  The vast majority (~70%)
> of the money spent on software in America is not spent on 
> mass-market apps, but on custom software for individual companies.  
> That C is used to write Microsoft Word is therefore hardly indicative
> that "all the products" are written in C.  

I didn't say that "all the products" we're all written in C.  And I won't
assume by your comment here that you're saying all the custom software is
written in Smalltalk, Lisp or Prolog.  Or even that most of it, or even
that a significant portion of it, is written in Smalltalk, Lisp or
Prolog.  I'll just assume that you missed my point.

> Take a look at the largest software systems in existence--airline 
> reservation systems, the Social Security administration's databases,
> the US military's systems.  None of those are written in C, and for
> good reason.  C is a terrible language to use on very big projects.
> They're written in COBOL and Ada, which scale much better than C.

Ada, COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal and others were not intended to be excluded
from the "widely adopted language" category by their omission.

> In fact, C is a terrible language for anything but assembly language
> type jobs.

Methinks you display some of your ignorance here.

> Smalltalk is extremely widely used in certain markets.  Those markets
> that use it need the ability to make major changes in large apps
> *extremely quickly*.  Markets that use Smalltalk are less sensitive
> to hardware requirements.  The best example of a market that uses
> Smalltalk in preference to C is in investment banking, where improved
> financial analysis codes can translate directly into large competitive
> advantages.  If you and I owned investment banks, and you relied on
> C programmers to make changes to your analysis and market-prediction
> code, then my Smalltalk programmers would put you out of business
> in short order.
> 
> John Kuszewski
> johnk@spasm.niddk.nih.gov

Look, I'm not taking the position that Smalltalk has nothing to offer or
that Smalltalk is not the correct language of choice for certain
projects.  I'm making the point that Smalltalk is not _the_ answer, or
even that close to _the_ answer, or it would be used more widely.  I'm
also taking issue with the attitude and arrogance of the guy my post was
responding to.

Java is not a bad language that should go away simply because it is not
Smalltalk, and people who program in the languages of the intelligentsia
are not necessarily better, more productive or making a larger
contribution to the advancement of the art than those using widely adopted
languages.  They do seem to have somewhat of a larger chip on their
shoulders though.

Doug Bell
dbell@shvn.com