browse keys (@bk)

[Ron Kracht]

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

>You may not *like* or *agree* with my appraisals of and opinions about
>filePro's implementation design decisions, John, but I've been
>programming professionally in 4 or 5 languages for 20 years: I am
>entitled to hold those opinions.
>
>I'm giving up now. I really don't feel the need to be involved with
>a package that's designed so differently from every other procedural
>programming on the planet that it allows me to look foolish once a week,
>saying "oh, they couldn't possibly be so dumb as to have made it work
>like *that*; that's crazy stuff.
>
>  
>
I find it interesting that you so vehemently defend your right to hold 
your opinions while claiming that the opinions and decision of 
programmers who have more years of experience  and have programmed 
professionally in at least as many languages are "dumb" and "crazy".

One of the interesting things I was told early on regarding claims of 
experience is that they don't have much value. Some people can have 5 
years experience and other people can have 1 years experience 5 times.  
With a little bit of effort you can tell one from the other.

I had done a significant amount of Forth programming before I learned C 
and the necessary and somewhat shocking shift in thinking taught me 
right away not to expect one programming language to be, or be like, 
another. In some ways learning a new programming language is not 
significantly different from learning a new (foreign) language. I might 
expect languages in the same family, Romance languages for example, to 
share common features but I wouldn't expect Hebrew and Spanish to follow 
the same rules.

One of the decisions every programmer makes when confronted with a new 
language is "can I be productive enough in this language to make it 
worth the effort of learning the language".  Certainly crossover skills 
are a factor in this decision  but it's shortsighted to allow them to be 
the only factor.  Sometime the answer to the question is yes, sometimes 
the answer is no. You are certainly entitled to answer no for any 
language but that does not make people who decide yes, or the language 
designers, "crazy" or "dumb".

For the record, I've been working for Small and .... and ... and 
fPTechnologies since 1988, when I wrote the browse lookup code, and I'm 
not sure I would have made the same decisions that the earlier 
programmers (Ken among them) made with respect to language design or 
code organization but I respect them and their skills enough to know 
that those decisions were made by extremely intelligent and highly 
skilled programmers.