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




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list