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From: aaron@funcity.njit.edu (Aaron Watters)
Subject: Re: GNU Extension Language Plans
Message-ID: <1994Oct24.154723.17017@njitgw.njit.edu>
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References: <38a3mk$lr8@csnews.cs.Colorado.EDU> <22Oct1994.212632.Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 15:47:23 GMT
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In article <22Oct1994.212632.Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU> Alan@lcs.mit.EDU (Alan Bawden) writes:
...
>Let me correct what seems to be a common misconception.  "Ivory tower"
>types don't advocate these things just because they think they are
>beautiful, they actually believe that these properties make programming
>languages better tools for software engineering.  

No question about it.
But because most of them haven't written a program that had to
compete in any real marketplace for years (maybe ever) they are
usually wrong.  [I don't want to start any more flame wars than I have
to, so I omit an example here.]

>You may disagree with
>that, or you may think that software engineering isn't relevant for an
>extension language, or you may think that modern beliefs about software
>engineering are bunk....

Not at all.  When I talk with people who have real experience with
large projects I generally think their insights are very valuable.
I rarely hear anything about the "Von Neumann bottleneck" however,
this kind of bunk only comes from academics (like myself).

When I was struggling with some of the design decisions of Python,
Guido Van Rossum (python creator and god) once flamed me that "Your
intuitions are generally wrong" (I think he was using the universally
quantified "you", but I can't be sure). This pissed me off at the time.
As it turned out he was right on the particular point of discussion.
He may be right about academic intuitions and "research" (that is,
guesswork) about programming languages more generally.

One of the things I like about python is that it clearly has not
been overly influenced by some of the goofier and less generally
useful programming language ideas that academics have failed to
impose on the world outside of the fishbowl.

        Aaron Watters
        Department of Computer and Information Sciences
        New Jersey Institute of Technology
        University Heights
        Newark, NJ 07102
                phone (201)596-2666
		fax (201)596-5777
		home phone (908)545-3367
		email: aaron@vienna.njit.edu

ps: check out http://www.cwi.nl/~guido/Python.html
