[geeks] forking stupid interpreters

[David Cantrell]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 04:06:03PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> On Monday, March 25, 2002 at 11:14:40 (+0000), David Cantrell wrote:
> > This is over-simplistic.  The vast majority of spam I get is neither from
> > known spammers nor from open relays.
> You must not be using the right lists of open relays and known spammers
> then.

Yeah right.  How about crediting people with just a TEENSY bit of Clue?

> > You would do well to read the study at:
> >   http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer2000.pdf
> An interesting study indeed!  Perhaps in return you'd read "The Practice
> Of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike.

Been there done that, didn't bother with the T-shirt.

> I'm somewhat stunned that they consider Java to not be a scripting
> language, despite the fact it's implemented and used that way almost
> exclusively as far as I can see.  That way of looking at things
> certainly seems to colour their conclusions a _lot_.

Java used as scripting language?  Really?  I see it being used to build
applications*.  To me, a script is something that runs through once and
stops, non-interactively.  A program keeps running, interacts with the
user(s), and may or may not stop.  Any language can be used to write
scripts, and any language can be used to write programs.

THEIR definition seems to be "if it seperates compile/link from run, it's
not a scripting language", which is, I suppose, as good a definition as
any if you have to come up with one.  It is of course arbitrary, especially
as the task they're looking at fits my definition of scripting.

> It's too bad Smalltalk and perhaps some OO scripting language like Ruby
> were not included in their study.

It is only very recently that Ruby has become popular enough that they
could have got sufficient examples of it to draw conclusions from.  Yes,
I'd have liked to see Smalltalk in there.  And Forth, and Prolog, and awk,
and ...  But you have to draw the line somewhere.  They seem to have drawn
it in a sensible place, by including commonly used languages and excluding
less commonly used ones.

* - and to do so badly, but that's not the issue :-)

-- 
David Cantrell | Benevolent Dictator | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

   The voices said it's a good day to clean my weapons