browse keys (@bk)

[John Hemmer]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Kracht" <rkracht at filegate.net>
To: "filePro mailing list" <filepro-list at seaslug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2004 1:34 AM
Subject: Re: browse keys (@bk)


> 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.
> 
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>
 
Ron,

Very well put.

John


I have programmed since 1964, doing Scientific, Real-Time and Software
engineering. I have both hareware and software experience, writing I/O 
Drivers and Disk Operation systems, along with diagnosing Hardware 
problems down to the malfunctioning gate. I have experience on several
dozens of operating systems. I have experience in Assembler, Fortran,
Cobol, C and Filepro. Most of my experience on filePro dates to 1985.
Until 1999 it was in version 1.0 and 3.0 on the Dec VAX which was 
no longer supported by filePro. As a result some of the filePro feature
did not work. For example. I could not define, non-filePro files. Given
what I had to work with I found that there was no task that I could not 
do one way or another. Since 1999 I have been programming in version
4.8 and higher. Thus there are features I am still learning.

What continues to amaze me is the power of the filePro language and
how well designed it is.  Often Operating Systems and Languages are
designed by people with very little applications experience. I find that
filePro and those who designed it are an exception to this.

John