Re: Summary

[Paul Prescod <address@hidden>]

Michael St . Hippolyte wrote:
>...
> 
> Another way to describe it, not as witty I must admit, is that there are
> two fundamental constituencies for a language, the programmer and the
> program, and their needs are different.  If the goal is to give the
> programmer the most freedom and the widest range of features and
> capabilities at any given point in the process, you get a practical and
> easy-to-crank-out-a-program language like Perl.  On the other hand if the
> goal is to yield the most elegant, versatile and durable programs, you get
> a strict language which limits the freedom of the programmer in order to
> impose various formal properties on programs.  Writers' languages vs.
> architects' languages.

You forgot the constituency of "other people" like:

  * the person who has to maintain your code
  * the person who has to learn from it
  * the person who has to integrate it into a larger system
  * the person who has to devise tests for it
  * the person who has to estimate how long it will take to improve it

I can't help but feel that these people are more important than "the 
program" itself.

  Paul Prescod