Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tektronix!percival!littlei!ogccse!pase
From: pase@ogccse.ogc.edu (Douglas M. Pase)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: opinions on computer languages
Message-ID: <1790@ogccse.ogc.edu>
Date: 15 Sep 88 17:01:08 GMT
References: <3938@enea.se> <1399@garth.UUCP>
Reply-To: pase@ogccse.UUCP (Douglas M. Pase)
Organization: Oregon Graduate Center, Beaverton, OR
Lines: 46

In article <1399@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes:
>
>To me, the question is: Do the powers that be define exactly those
>operators which are sufficient and cast all others (and the cpus) into
>the Outer Darkness? Or do we provide access the hardware and an
>appropriate encapsulation technique?

This illustrates what seems to be a common misconception among a large share
of the net.  Language designers are *not* a Good Ol' Boys Club with vast and
far reaching powers beyond the ken of mere mortals.  They're not even trying
to impede your best efforts.  They're people with ideas that solve problems.

Who are those great ``powers that be'' among language designers anyway?
Backus?  Kernighan?  Ritchie?  A sinister group of Frenchmen?  Viscious
rumormongers at Xerox PARC?  I'll certainly admit that these are influential.
But why are they influential?  Because they had an idea (or, in the case of
Backus, several ideas) that solved a lot of problems people were having.
What's more, they were able to translate those ideas into a form that others
would find useful (compilers, language descriptions, etc.).

So, are you tired of waiting for the (all knowing, deeply respected, great
and wonderful, totally awsome, thoroughly rad) ``powers that be'' to do what
you tell them?  Become a ``powers that be''!!  (It takes little imagination
to see why they're ignoring you -- they're too busy with new ideas of their
own.)  If your ideas are so great, (listening Herman?) just  1) write them
up as a language proposal,  2) implement and distribute a compiler (with
documentation, of course), or, 3) if you don't want to re-invent the wheel,
put them together as a pre-processor package a la C++.  If you can't do any
of those things, then you have no effective means for communicating your
ideas, and just maybe you don't know enough to know whether your ideas are
as generally useful as you think they are.

Ideas are popular because they solve problems, not because of some conspiracy
designed to thwart you and promote someone else.  The rhetoric so far has been
interesting, but I feel no more enlightened about what language characteristics
or features would satisfy those who complain the most.  Much that has been said
does seem to deal with isolated problems, but looks like, if implemented and
used, it would cause other problems in their place (portability is most
frequently cited).

Shot from the hip of:
-- 
Douglas M. Pase				Department of Computer Science
tektronix!ogccse!pase			Oregon Graduate Center
pase@cse.ogc.edu (CSNet)		19600 NW Von Neumann Dr.
(503) 690-1121 x7303			Beaverton, OR  97006-1999