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