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

Tue Dec 14 21:33:10 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On 12/14/2010 3:01 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>
>> As to Perl.. though it still is my preferred language for getting
>> things done (mainly because I understand it that I first think out
>> problems in Perl then convert to other languages), I have seen some
>> bad, really bad Perl code..
>
> And your point is? I consider the fact that *every* *single* *time* tomcat
> crashes ("you cannot have null pointer exceptions in java", the books all
> said), the stack trace is 150 or 200 calls deep. Show me something written
> in C, or C++, or perl, or php, or... that's that bad.

That's not really a language problem - that's a programmer assuming that 
exceptions won't happen and not bothering to catch them in appropriate 
places.  But when does tomcat crash anyway?

> And then there was the guy I worked with in the late eighties, who
> converted a 3000-line RPGIII program to a 600 line RPGII program, while I
> went from a 2200-line COBOL program to 600+ lines....

If you don't like java's verbosity, you might like groovy.  You can, for 
example, print items from a database in about 3 lines. 
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GROOVY/Tutorial+6+-+Groovy+SQL
(and from any database type that has a jdbc driver, and from any 
platform that runs java).

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com