browse keys (@bk)

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 01:34:53AM -0400, Ron Kracht wrote:
> 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".

I'm the paying customer.  But, mostly, it was a reaction to John's
vehemence in saying I'm an idiot.  No one reacts well to that; and my
wellspring of tolerance was pretty much empty yesterday.

> 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.

True.  But while the difference between Forth and C *is* similar to the
difference between English and, say, Mandarin, my estimation is that
filePro falls in the "common procedural" category, the same way that
Spanish falls in the "common Romance" category: I *do* expect a fair
degree of commonality between filePro and basic/cobol/pascal/c/perl/python
... and *none* of those smash case without warning or documentation.

> 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".

IMHO, designing a language that fits in that category, but breaks so
many of the assumptions which that category engenders in coders was
less than optimal.  I will spot them this, though: I do understand that
filePro "jes growed"; it wasn't *originated* as the application
development environment that it has become.  And yes, they deserve a
little more slack because of that -- possibly, more than I'm giving
them.  :-)

> 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.

Administar.  And I don't remember the other one, either.

Indeed.  And, while it's possible to infer from my distaste for the
*decisions* that I have no time for the designers, I don't, really,
mean that, and I hope they don't take it personally -- it's just
business.  :-)

And, see?  I'm capable of having a nice, professional, level-headed
conversation about the issues. 

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	"You know: I'm a fan of photosynthesis as much as the next guy,
	but if God merely wanted us to smell the flowers, he wouldn't 
	have invented a 3GHz microprocessor and a 3D graphics board."
					-- Luke Girardi