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Re: Emacs, was Re: YAPAS (Yet Another Python Advocacy Story)
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Nicolai wrote:
> Is it just me, or does anybody else see the logical flaw involved in
> attempting to get people to abandon their feature bloated gui intensive
> Word like word processors (or whatever you want to call it) in favor of
> something else?
No one has proposed abandoning Word. Why are you bringing it up?
> It would be percieved as going backwards. If you are to
> use a scripted language like Python, as the author of the article
> proposed, then you will need to be able to write a program like
> Word.
Why are you FUDding the issue? Here's the original quote:
[...]
My dream is a world wherein all but the very lowest levels and
tightest loops of programs are written in a language that is so
simple that it can be taught in primary school as a first
language; where every word-processor user who can write a macro
can at least try to dive into their word processor's source
code to fix a bug, because the macro language is also the
implementation language.
It says nothing about being able to write Word if you use Python, either
as some magical capability of Python or Python programmers.
> People will
> continue to demand programs like Word, and very shortly will demand
> programs that they see as better (translate: bigger bloatware) than
> Word. Abomination it may be, but guess what? The next versions will be
> even bigger abominations.
Why are you confusing the issue here, Nicolai? Microsoft's business
practices surrounding Word are not germane to the discussion.
Paul Prescod is offering Python as a better programming language for
software development. Here's the crux of his argument:
[...] Computer programming is hard. It is precisely because it
is hard that there is no excuse for adding artificial obstacles
like modern languages rooted in the idioms of dead languages,
and adding syntaxes so complex that humans cannot keep them in
their head.
Prescod is advocating a rethinking of software development practices
which demand that programmers steep themselves in decades of tradition
he considers to be extraneous[1]; he advocates using a language that is
powerful enough to scale up to large software projects (like Zope) yet
is simple enough to teach a young child.
It's not about rewriting having a bunch of 12-year olds rewrite KDE
from scratch, in as much as it's promoting a language that can be used
to write another KDE so that it's simple enough for a 12-year old to
customize and hack.
> I seriously doubt that an abomnination bigger
> than Word could be done in Python, therefore I doubt that Python will
> replace C/C++. And that's w/o even addressing the issue of an Operating
> System done in a scripted language.
You're using Word as a battle cry for a syntax war against Python.
No one wants a syntax war here. I find it to be a reasonable environment,
and I'm dumbfounded why you continue to disparage it.
Z.
[1] ObPerl: At dinner tonight, we discussed this very point. While the
Python community appears to favor simplicity and generality at all
costs, the Perl community is indeeded steeped in the UNIX tradition,
where effective users of UNIX (and Perl) are exposed to many different
syntaxes (sed, awk, grep, dc, etc.) and techniques. Whether or not
an effective Perl programmer must acquire these UNIXisms is up for
discussion.
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