Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!linac!convex!tchrist
From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Kolstad's Konjecture
Message-ID: <1991Feb25.184544.20726@convex.com>
Date: 25 Feb 91 18:45:44 GMT
References: <1991Feb22.211643.12151@linus.mitre.org> <1991Feb23.013443.15843@ico.isc.com> <3021@charon.cwi.nl>
Sender: tchrist@convex.com (Tom Christiansen)
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 34

From the keyboard of guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum):
:If you want to see for yourself what the advantages are of using
:indentation for grouping, you can now fetch the brand new Python
:language from alt.sources or an archive (it is stored in pub in
:wuarchive.wustl.edu) and learn Python -- an alternative to Perl with
:reasonable syntax, if I may say so.

"Reasonable" is a matter of perspective, not fact.  For me, having
whitespace be significant and using indentation for grouping are
highly undesirable traits.  Guido as speaking as the language's
author.  I don't really want to speak for Lwall, but it wouldn't
surprise me if he though perl to be an alternative to python, but
with a reasonable syntax.

I guess it's time to throw out an idea I first hear from Rob Kolstad:

    Kolstad's Konjecture: A new programming language will enjoy widespread
    success in the UNIX community in direct proportion to that language's
    resemblance to C; compare the relative success of awk, perl, and C++ 
    with that of icon, scheme, and smalltalk.

Notice that this says "in the UNIX community".  Certainly the latter set
of languages have their proponents, but I think it's pretty obvious that
the first set have caught on so strongly in our community as a direct
result of their similarity to C.  The second set are interesting studies
in comparative cyberlinguistics and have caught on in some other camps, 
but much less so here that the first set.

--tom
-- 
"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because
 that would also stop you from doing clever things." -- Doug Gwyn

 Tom Christiansen                tchrist@convex.com      convex!tchrist