[Chicago] Language Comparison Lighting Talk Submissions

[Martin Maney]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 12:33:52PM -0600, Garrett Smith wrote: I think
> they also attract personality types. Brian, for example, has a very
> simple brain, which Python, a very simple language, fits nicely. I'd
> say the same for Pete, but he'd take it the wrong way. Brian will
> agree though, as he knows I share that characteristic :)

When I was young, I thought assembler was the buzz - it was a lot of
work, and could get awfully complex even for fairly simple things, but
that was okay.  As I matured I found C more to my liking - short of
intentional obfuscation it's both terser and clearer than assembly
code, and whatever lingering lust for the low level complexities it
didn't satisfy could be quenched by rewriting, eg., the compiler's
support library's software division routine (hard to recall the day
when a CPU could lack hardware multiply and divide yet still be a
serious micro, innit?).  These days I dislike being forced to work with
such ungainly languages, though apparently I still can at need (but
PIC assembler is absolutely right out - never again).  Python helps me
find the simpler solutions my sometimes tired old mind likes better.

-- 
As economics is known as The Miserable Science, software engineering should
be known as The Doomed Discipline, doomed because it cannot even approach
its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. -- Edsger Dijkstra