New prototype language
Duane Maxwell
dmaxwell at san.rr.com
Sat Mar 27 15:11:02 UTC 2004
On Mar 27, 2004, at 4:14 AM, Lothar Schenk wrote:
> I doubt if one can get substantial advances in programmer productivity
> by
> focussing on the use of whitespace or letter case in language syntax.
I've been doing a substantial amount of contract programming in Python
for my paying work, and while I was initially very skeptical about the
whitespace/indention block scoping thing, I was surprised to find it
did, in fact, increase my productivity, particularly if the tools make
it easy to control it. Python is such a simple language that I can
blast out tons of good code in a short period of time, mainly because I
give very little mindshare to syntax over semantics.
I've also had to do a lot of very complicated Flash work in the last
couple of years, and made major use of the prototyping strengths of
Actionscript/Javascript/ECMAScript. Once you take it out of the
context of the browser, ECMAScript is actually a very nice little
language. It will be interesting to see what happens with KDE 3.2
which now supports a complete binding for ECMAScript.
I can see where these guys are trying to go with this new language, and
they might get some traction if they can indeed utilize existing Python
modules, but as we all know, the quality of a language is no indicator
of broad acceptance.
Of course, I'd prefer Smalltalk over all of these, but I unfortunately
it has not been the solution for the particular problems I've been
asked to solve.
-- Duane
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