Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!knuth!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg From: elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Re: Functional Programming (Re: Good programmers and assembly language) Message-ID: <00671693310@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> Date: 15 Apr 91 05:28:30 GMT References: <1535@tronsbox.xei.com> <7235@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> <1529@tronsbox.xei.com> <7256@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home Lines: 103 From article <1535@tronsbox.xei.com>, by dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan): > In article <7256@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> mr3@ukc.ac.uk (M.Rizzo) writes: > |In article <1529@tronsbox.xei.com> dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan) writes: > |> That's not a hasty comment; that's one based on all the code I've seen > |>from such wonderful languages as C, C++ and SmallTalk that look like line noise. > |>I'd rather learn assembly than spend my life pondering strings of non- > |>alphanumeric symbols. > |Is this some kind of a joke or what ? Do you honestly believe that > |the thousands of people using the above-mentioned languages are a > |bunch of idiots and you are some supreme programmer because you use > |assembler ? > |Did you ever try to learn one of the above languages properly before > |making up your mind ? (By properly I mean using a language for at > I spent the better part of a year wrestling with C. I spent most of > that time tripping over stupid syntactical errors brought about by the > hieroglyphic-like nature of the language. Hmm. All I can ask is, "Are you suffering from major brain damage, or a simple case of the 'slows'?". If you've lived in "C" code for a year, you can eat, sleep, and drink "C". You can even read Matt Dillon's code, if you play with "C" long enough! > Still don't care how many lines it takes. Since I don't code without You should. I program assembler with extensive comments, too, and I still have to do a whole lot more page-flipping to trace my flow of control than I do in "C". There's a point where conciseness wins. When I can get my entire function, my entire algorithm, onto one page of my screen (albeit that I generally run a severely overscanned interlaced screen!), that function becomes a WHOLE lot easier to debug. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a whole lot of difficulty doing that with assembler. > |>If there was a language with the > |>power of C or assembler and the readability of Cobol, I'd marry it. Cobol? *COBOL*??? NO WONDER! (Use of Cobol for six or more months is guaranteed to cause baldness, impotence, and a few other plagues upon humanity... typical Cobol programmers think that EMACS is something sold at McDonald's, and think that UNIX is something to do with harems... MVS/CICS is their world, the whole world). I've programmed COBOL. I consider it to be a plague upon the world. It fits that you'd love Cobol, because "Hello_World" in COBOL is more lines of code than I particularly care for. The so-called "readability" is akin to the so-called "readability" of Ada... i.e., it consists of turning simple accepted computer science symbols into long sentences of words that mean not one more thing to a "real" programmer. > Read it again. 90% of what you object to is how Cobol works, not > how readable it is. (A friend who works with Cobol and BAL once told me of an > incident at work. He showed a piece written in Cobol to another programmer > who only did BAL, and she said "It's nice pseudocode, but what about the real > program?") Heheh. Just tells you about the mentality of people who program in BAL! If you want real "pseudocode", use Pascal. The Algol-like pseudocode used in most algorithms journals is extremely close to Pascal... can almost plug-and-play, many times. > |>|I can assure you that languages such as Miranda, Hope and ML, do > |>|provide significant advantages over traditional programming languages. > No, from the excerpts in the review, I'd say they're more critical. > From what I saw, it looks like they take the position that functional languages > are a total waste of time. I only said that I didn't like them. Interesting... if you're looking for opinion articles from obviously biased people. I suppose you agree with everything Bill Buckley or (hmm, who's a liberal columnist?) writes, too. I view such books as entertainment, mostly... few of them have much to say from a conceptual viewpoint. [My own personal opinion is that languages much higher level than C++ are impractical on common microcomputers due to their greater resource usage... or as Alan Perlis put it, "A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything and the cost of nothing."] > |Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, you are living proof that assembler > |does not separate the men from the boys. Why don't you try reading a > |few good books like Grady Booch's "Object-Oriented Design" which will > Because I don't give a damn about "Object Oriented Programming". > I have never actually heard anyone give a clear, concise description of just > what this is supposed to get me, as a programmer. That includes my sysadmin, > who lives for C++. Gee, he gave you a book on it! Are you just some grumbling octogenarian afraid of change, or have you actually written a project in an object-oriented fashion and found it to be, indeed, inferior to the way you're currently doing things? The way I see it, you're just like those steelworkers who insisted, "Nope, I ain't gonna do it, this was good enough for my daddy, it's good enough for me" when asked to upgrade their skills to improve productivity... those same steelworkers are out the door, now, their companies bankrupted or fired all those workers to install new technology for which such workers refused to be retrained. I wonder what'll happen to you when the day comes that your claims of "Nope, I ain't gonna do it, this was good enough for me twenty [years/minutes/etc] ago, it's good enough for me today" reach unsympathetic ears? -- Eric Lee Green (318) 984-1820 P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM uunet!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg