Re: Y Store now C++

[Jerry Jackson <address@hidden>]

Ken Anderson wrote:

> This story depresses me also.
> 
> I believe that  domain specific languages are a good thing.
> Especially if users can make sense of it, as in your case.
> My experience from common lisp is that an application can have several minilanguages in it.
> Such languages can be implemented in a relatively tiny amount of code, in some languages, at least, 

> and generate a substantial pile of code in the base language.Olin Shiver's talk at LL1 which described an awk  

> implementation in scheme is a good example of how small an implementation can be.
> 
> In your case, what actually got recoded in Java?  Was it the language implementation, or was the language 

> obliterated and everything was written in Java?  Things like relative lines of code might provide interesting statistics.
> 


Well, the original language implementation _was_ in Java.  The 
functional language compiled to Java.  It wasn't very readable Java but 
it could have easily been made more so.  I even suggested that during 
the discussions around recoding with the idea that if things went south 
for us they could extract the intermediate Java and go forward from 
there.  No luck.  They wanted to code everything directly in Java so 
that "any Java programmer would be able to understand it".

There was also a fairly strong feeling from some of the developers who 
came on to the project later in the game that they would be more 
marketable if they could put Java on their resumes instead of our 
proprietary language.

One amusing twist to the story:

Before the "issues" arose around the language, things were going well 
and there was a push to hire more developers to write rating 
methodologies.  We had more than one person come in who, after being 
told that we used language XXXX, claimed significant past experience 
with it!

--Jerry