🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <JOELH.94Nov20001243@pollock.math.swt.edu>,
Holveck <joelh@pollock.math.swt.edu> wrote:
>I am having FUN...  I wonder if it's NET FUN or GROSS FUN?
>
>>>>>> "marcoxa" == Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@mosaic.nyu.edu> writes:
>
>    > The same kind of people you are mentioning have learned and
>    > wrote zillions of lines of junky code in so-called macro
>    > languages like 123 and Excel. They "get the job done" but it
>    > does not mean that they would have written the same zillions of
>    > lines of junk code in a different language.
>
>I recall one time I had to write a rather complex database manager.
>Fine, no prob, it wasn't anything elaborate, just a lot of code.
>
>Until the client told me he wanted it in 123.
>
>"So that other people who don't know C can modify it."  I wrote the
>silly thing as structured as I could.  It ended up looking like a
>horrid cross between 123, Pascal and old-school BASIC that never
>should have lived.  It ended up being something that only somebody who
>understands both structured and unstructured programming could
>decipher.  A pain to construct, horrific to maintain, this monstrosity
>should never have seen the light of day.
>
>I *never* want to see anything like that become the *norm*.

I said 'dear gurus, give us something as simple, regular and maintainable
as a normal procedural language anybody graduated from college knows
anyway.  Please, do not push an another Forth (isn't it great
actually), Prolog (this fifth generation computers were really big
one day, isn't it so), Occam (one has to do just a little bit of
efforts in order to become comfortable in the Occam environment),
sh/awk (thank you very much) etc.'

I happen to run into report writer for accounting package which
would not allow you to print overdue accounts because it
did not have date arithmetics. Once I wrote 1000 lines
of code in order just to disable built-in smarts of SQL*FORMS,
etc. I happen to see (thanks God I did not have to use it at
the time) some 'problem-oriented subset of natural language' bastard.

So, in my view it has to be a normal flexible/powerful language
without any kind of 'isms'. Do you agree with that or your point was 
that it has to be a full blown language not necessary a 'normal' one ?

I had time to think about it a little bit more recently. It seems
that in modern world requirement for language to be interpretable
is not so important. It was an issue in LSI-11/DX1 environment
when in order to (re)build small FORTRAN program one has to
swap disks three times. Now it is much less of the issue.
Second issue was the price of development environment. But we 
are talking about Free Software here, so it is not an issue also.
And I would not like to ever list goodies which come with
compilers (e.g. strict type checking). So, why not "C" ?

>	  Joel Ray Holveck, joelh@dali.math.swt.edu, KC5ACN

Aleksey