[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Scriptometer: measuring the ease of SOP (Script Oriented Programming) of programming languages
> - 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