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From: dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Functional Programming (Re: Good programmers and assembly language)
Message-ID: <1547@tronsbox.xei.com>
Date: 16 Apr 91 07:40:27 GMT
References: <1529@tronsbox.xei.com> <7256@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> <00671693310@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM>
Organization: Romantic Encounters BBS
Lines: 66

In article <00671693310@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM> elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) writes:
|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!

	Sez you.  I am not the only student of computer programming who thinks
C is overly cryptic.

|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.

	I read in excess of 1600 words per minute, so volume just doesn't
concern me.  An overabundance of symbols DOES concern me- it's like hitting 
a roadblock.

|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 have never in my life written or even learned a single iota of Cobol.
I've seen Cobol code, but that's it.

|
|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.

	Speak for yourself.  I've seen Ada code, too, and I liked the look of
it a whole lot more than I liked C.  I've got a book on it here that I keep
meaning to read, but it's pushed way down on the stack- new books keep getting
put on top of it, not all of them computer related.


|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.

	NO, it means that NO ONE has ever given me a CLEAR, CONCISE description
of just WHAT THE HELL 'object oriented programming' IS.  That includes my local
C++ junkie.

|Eric Lee Green   (318) 984-1820  P.O. Box 92191  Lafayette, LA 70509
|elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM               uunet!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg


dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com   ...uunet!tronsbox!dfrancis     GEnie: D.HEFFERNAN1
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"I swear eternal hostility to all forms of tyranny over the Amiga OS."
	--me, with apologies to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Addington :-)