Interesting article on programming languages

[Manuel Gutierrez Algaba]

On Wed, 26 Jan Alexander Williams <thantos at chancel.org> wrote:
>Personally, I found Sweeny's article to be interesting in content but,
>in the end analysis, blind to the facts.  Interestingly, he discards
>the entire class of functional programming languages within the first
>two paragraphs, then summarises his article with the 'needed
>facilities' the industry will need in the next decade ... which,
>perversely enough, /already exist and have been used successfully for
>years/ in the first group of languages he threw out.
>
>I'm tempted to create a new term: Ivory Tower Commercialia, meaning
>the tendency for Corp programmers to believe /everything/ must be like
>Java to be worthwhile ...
>

I started to read that article, but I got bored too soon. It's 
a bit amazing how succesful programming people ( usually in USA )
have so poor visions of Information technologies. Anyone with 
a bit of common sense realize that in fact there're two main
broad ways of handling things:

- the rigorous/mathematical one : This is the way of Haskell or
Design by contract of Eiffel. This one is like wearing a XV century
armor, you walk very safely but in a very tiring way. Anyway
it's the best way because it's the safest one. This way will tend
to be more and more used because it's systematic and proffessional
and low level things will be handled by C libraries.

- the scripting way: python as the maximum representative. Fast,
very fast design, but not very clearly defined in terms of types
and if every function what is intended to do.  This way has 
all the benefit the other lacks: fast and clear vision (high ) of the
algorithms and flows of data . 

Anyone should respect both ways because both are good and both
are necessary, first python, then Haskell to put in a rigorous
way. Functional programming is not "theorical" , it's just 
the __ultimate__ way of expressing things, once that things
have been sketched with python.


Using Java or C++ is just to mix both approaches and getting no
benefit of any.


-- 
MGA