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Python advocacy

bayinnaung at my-deja.com bayinnaung at my-deja.com
Fri Dec 15 16:44:12 EST 2000 
In article <3A39AC3E.FA75C4FF at engcorp.com>,
  Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:

Regarding language advocacy...
>There is no reason to focus on the fact that people
>appear to take this sort of thing personally.
>That's probably just human nature,
>and likely not even a Bad Thing.

As far as it constitutes *blindness* it does seem like a *bad thing*:

Take for instance continuations, coroutines, and micro-threads,
a hot topic in the Python world.
There are small implementations with thorough descriptions
in the Scheme world that can be experimented with immediately:
   Essentials of Programming Languages by Friedman, Wand, and Haynes
   Lisp in Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec

The book on compiling continuations is written in ML:
   Compiling with Continuations by Andrew J. Appel

In the web design world Flash "movie clips" are a co-routine-like
potential gold mine of examples for future Python.

The canvas and text widget interfaces of tkinter (the tk library)
provide a great guide to what can be done with JFC classes.
Much of Topley's advanced JFC book is trivial in tkinter.

What about Lisp's meta-object protocol? There are echoes of that
in the C++ design pattern world.

What about Microsoft's .NET separation of run-time and language
(e.g. regexes), the designer himself goes as far to say that
syntax/language might be construed as a programmer preference
in the future:
   http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.html

Taking things personally makes it difficult to think
in a cross-language sort of way.

>the author is oblivious to the huge investment people
>put into developing systems in a particular language
>(not to mention the investment in *learning* that language)
>and the fact that as long as the language stays popular,
>improves, and continues to serve their needs well,
>they get a payoff from that investment.

How could opening one's eyes to what's happening in
the programming world outside one's language
decrease payoff?...

...it might even help prevent extinction ala Lisp.

What about MS .NET's split between language and runtime.
or the actual changing of the instruction set of the virtual machine
to support generic programming?

These are bound to change the way scripting languages are put together
even though a true language advocate would probably put his fingers in
his ears when he heard the word "Microsoft" , ".NET", or "C#" .

The thing that struck me most about that paper was how
the same people who are logically exacting in their trade:
programming in a specific language, are not logically exacting when
listening to someone talking about something bigger, more inclusive
than their trade, namely *programming in general*.

Jon Fernquest
bayinnaung at hotmail.com


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