Re: programming language genealogy -- RPG400-L

Steve Richter wrote:

I just dont agree with rejecting things that work because they dont meet the
catch all definitions imposed by academics and other blowhards.  The OO
discussion of a few weeks ago is an example of this.  Programming and design
methods which Hans correctly defined as "modular programming" work very
well, yet the OO crowd dismiss them simply because they are not OO.

But at least the OO crowd has their own distinct wording.  Sennet has
hijacked the generic "programming language" term for her own narrow
definition.

Jean Sammet is a highly respected expert in the field of programming languages, and so her opinions cannot be ignored easily. No one is forcing any definition down anyones throat. Based on her studes of programming languages, she has come up with a useful definition of what a programming language is. Whether or not you or anyone else accept that definition is irrelevant for the purposes of that definition.

If you *really* think her definition is worth debating, is there any activity of writing programs in a programming language not covered by her definition? Or does her definition include languages not used for computer programming?

In your first msg on this subject I read:
"a programming language is a set of characters with rules for combining
them. It has the following characteristics; 1) Machine code knowledge is
unnecessary, 2) Potential for conversion to other computers, 3) Instruction
explosion, and 4) problem-oriented notation.".
When did we all vote that languages have to be platform/hardware independent and portable?

Again, no one is forcing anyone to use tools that are platform or hardware independent or portable. But many people willingly choose to do so since that means their software will have a wider potential audience. For example, it is the reason why GNU software is so widespread. It is the reason why Apache and Perl (to name a few examples) are so popular.

Seperating the language from the OS adds levels of
abstraction, which means more details that the programmer has to deal with.

No. In most cases, it means fewer details that the programmer has to deal with. To take one example from the Python class library, one commonly used function is "os.path.join()", which combines elements of a file path name intelligently. Without that, you'd have to code special cases for each platform you wanted the program to run on. But more to the point, even if your program was intended solely for one particular platform, it would still be easier using that function than assembling the path name yourself.

The bottom line is that if languages had useful platform dependent features
they would be eagerly used by programmers.

But only if your program was only ever intended to be run on one particular platform. These days, fewer and fewer shops run homogenous system environments.

Cheers! Hans