Re: Scriptometer: measuring the ease of SOP (Script Oriented Programming) of programming languages

[Dave Long <address@hidden>]

> - a powerful debugger
> - an interpreter/compiler that is fast for small programs

These reminded me of Hoare's "Hints on
Programming Language Design" (Stanford
AI Memo 224).  In order to encourage
design, documentation, and debugging,
he suggests that languages should be:

simple - small enough to be understood
secure - (life jacket, not script kiddie)
	a program should break in ways
	that are related to source-level
	concepts, not machine-level
quickly translated - to encourage change
	during development
efficient - so debug code won't be an
	excessive burden, etc.
readable - on the grounds that machine
	tools (pretty-printing, but what
	would he think of source browsers?)
	are unlikely to automatically make
	an unclear program much better.

Perhaps these are also related to his
notion of "security":
> - a reasonable string library
> - powerful lists/arrays having both functionalities ...
as it is better to have a failure due
to a missing (or unexpected) element
announce itself as such, than to die
in an apparently unrelated way (or to
dump core with no further clues).

Are powerful debuggers a modern approach
to efficiency and security, in that they
allow us to relate machine-level failures
to the bugs in the source logic?

-Dave