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

Tue Dec 14 21:37:51 UTC 2010
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org>

On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 15:33 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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).

Yes, but reference the preceding paragraph "programmer assuming that
exceptions won't happen".  The i-can-do-it-in-three-lines [a real
favorite of Pythonistas] claim should always make one shiver - because
it means the code doesn't manage errors (and is thus bad code).