Re: the advantages of garbage collection

Christen, Duane J. wrote:

I'm trying to understand Steve's reasoning on why RPG is bad because it doesn't have GC.

Trying to understand Steve is easy: if it's .NET, it's good. Even if you don't need it, if it's in .NET and you don't have it, your language is bad. Similarly, if it's not in .NET and you *do* have it, it's also bad.

In the MS-centric view, nothing is good until Microsoft adds a (usually incompatible) version of it to .NET. For example, LINQ is simply the MS version of OQL, which has been around for quite some time. MS copies technologies like OQL with the idea of "embrace, extend, extinguish". This actually worked for a long time; everything from DOS to Windows to Office.

However, that technique stopped working with Java; Microsoft's J# could never match Java. Indeed, the pace of the industry has gotten so fast that Microsoft usually ends up incorporating an older technology like OQL. Rather than actually integrating, they spend time (usually a couple of years) "dot-netting" it, while the state of the technology rushes on. In this case, a good example is SBQL, which has a much better syntax.

But now that MS has finally released LINQ, count on Steve to say that it's a new concept that nobody has ever seen and that if you don't have it your language sucks.

Joe