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

Tue Dec 14 21:38:28 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

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?

<chuckle> But it *is* a language problem, because any pretty much any
other language, you don't have function calls (oh, sorry, "methods")
hundreds of calls deep.
>
>> 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

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