[CentOS] OT: programming language for morons (newbie friendly language in Open Source world)

[Les Mikesell]

On 12/14/2010 4:01 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 12/14/2010 3:38 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>>
>>>> If you don't like java's verbosity, you might like groovy.  You can,
>>>> for
>>>
>>> OO in general, and java in particular, IMO, is trying to enforce good
>>> coding standards by compiler... except, of course, that it doesn't work.
>>>
>>>> example, print items from a database in about 3 lines.
>>>
>>> Really? I can do that in one:
>>> sqlplus (or mysql, or whatever)
>>> select * from mytable;
>>>
>>> Or from C, using, say, Pro*C:
>>> Exec SQL
>>>     select ....
>>> End-Exec
>>>
>>>           mark, being difficult
>>
>> I think besides being difficult you are missing the point - you can't do
>> anything else with those values from a sql server's own monitor tool -
>> and the way you do even that will vary with the sql server flavor.  With
>> groovy you can use any jdbc interface the same way and hand off the
>> values to any other java jars or code you have around - maybe use
>> jfreereport to graph them with a few more lines, etc.  I suppose you
>> could do that in C if you wanted to spend the rest of your life writing
>> it.
>
> Sure I can, but then, I know a good bit of sql as a language (bleah!). Why
> "the rest of my life"? Through the nineties, a *lot* of folks wrote a
> *lot* of C with embedded SQL as it's called.

The sql side is easy enough - the point you are missing is that you have 
access to any number of jdbc connections/versions at once (say you want 
to copy among different database types) and also to anything else 
already available as a java jar or source.  Writing the code to display 
a graph on most platforms is the part I thought would take you a 
substantial amount of time, where with groovy you can include swing and 
jfreereport and hand it some values.

> But I think the real point of this thread is that perl isn't bad, bad
> programmers (sorry, "developers") will write bad code in any language.

That may be someone's point.  Mine is that a lot of good code has 
already been written and is easily available.  Use it instead of writing 
your own bad code.  And this is especially true for perl and java with a 
little bit of overlap in the places you might use them. Groovy sort of 
increases that overlap.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com