RE: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

I know business decisions tend to be made by the pointy-haired
boss, rather than hackers.  What I'm saying is that in this
case (e.g. by not liking the language enough to write free
compilers for it) they forced the pointy-haired bosses' hands.

The pointy-haired boss may be the one who makes the actual
decision about what language to use, but his choices are 
limited to languages that have had actual uptake among hackers,
and that *is* usually determined by the best hackers.

It's surprising with the example of C in front of us that there
is even any debate about this issue.  Brilliant hackers at
Bell Labs create language for their own use, write Unix in
it, Unix takes over world, everyone (good hackers and bad)
learns C, pointy-haired boss decides C is a good choice for
implementing projects.  The hackers have made the decision 
for him years before.

--pg

--- Christopher Barber <cbarber@curl.com> wrote:
> > All three of the reasons you give for why Ada was more
> > expensive (no one used it by choice, no one wrote
> > libraries for it, and no one wrote compilers for it) are
> > just the symptoms of real hackers not liking it.
> 
> Only if you believe that "real hackers" are the only people who make
> business decisions regarding language choice.  I don't believe it. 
> On the
> first commercial project I ever worked on, we were forced to use
> COBOL
> because that is what the client demanded.  This kind of thing is not
> at all
> uncommon.
> 
> > It may have shown up in the DoD's books as "language too
> > expensive" but the root cause was "language sucked."
> 
> I don't know the language well enough to say that, but it still does
> have
> its adherents so it can't be that bad.
> 
> > The "average programmer" is a fuzzy target, and vague
> > aims always lead to bad work.
> 
> Yes, but who says that you have to have only one target prototypical
> programmer in mind?  Designing anything with only one person in mind
> is
> usually stupid, whatever the product.
> 
> If you design a language for yourself, you are least guaranteed that
> you
> will like it, and presumably others like you, but it would be foolish
> to
> assume that everyone will like it.
> 
> - Christopher
> 
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of
your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com
or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com