RE: MODERATOR ALERT

<EXITING LURKER MODE>

My fellow geeks:

My second-biggest single pet peeve in the whole world of computers (right
after bloatware) is the notion that any one language is, can be, or even
SHOULD be all things to all people.

Such a language has never existed. It probably never will.

Yet people persist in acting like it does. They've acted that way about C.
They've acted that way about Pascal (in spite of the fact that Niklaus
Wirth himself never intended it as a production language). Many people
still do act that way about both C and C++ (in spite of the fact that C is
really a low-level language disguised as a high-level language, and deals
with most types of data in the most absurdly primitive ways imaginable).
Many people also persist in thinking that way about Visual BASIC, in spite
of the fact that it's really just a ploy to co-opt a bunch of unskilled
programmers to flood the world with Windoze-only bloatware. Java is only
the latest language to be trumpeted as "the one language for everything."

Perhaps the biggest reason why this is such a pet peeve is because I spent
five years pursuing my Bachelor of Science degree (CSU Long Beach, 1985),
becoming fluent in every programming language I possibly could (Pascal,
PL/I, COBOL, PDP-11 Assembler, and LISP, in addition to BASIC and FORTRAN,
which I'd learned in high school), so that I could write software in
whatever language was needed, even if I had to teach myself yet another
one. It was nearly three years before I actually got a job as a
programmer, working for a publisher of software for the Commodore Amiga, a
job I had to leave after only two years, in order to preserve my sanity.
It was another four years and two months before I was hired by QuestComp,
a company that eventually evolved into Touchtone Corporation. Four hears
and two months during which I sent out resumes by the ream, during which
nobody had the slightest interest in hiring a mixed-language programmer
who was neither a Windoze specialist nor a C specialist, nor an RPG
specialist (nor any other kind of specialist).

The closest anybody has ever come to a "universal" programming language
would have to be Object PL/I. To the best of my knowledge, there's only
been one Object PL/I shop, anywhere in the world, at any time in history.
And (given that PL/I, of all languages, comes the closest to "you know
what I mean; just do it") there are lamentably few ordinary PL/I shops
still around. And I doubt that there's a single PL/I specialist in the
world who would seek to promote a "one language for everything" approach
even with PL/I.

The last place this sort of "one language for everything" or
"object/anti-object ideology" bovine scat belongs is on a list devoted to
the AS/400, even one devoted to a particular language on the AS/400.

<return to lurker mode>

--
James H. H. Lampert
Mixed-Language Programmer
And damn proud of it!