Language Laundry List

[Jeremy Dunn]

Hello again,

I know I dropped off the face of the earth for a while there but
numerous unplanned events conspired to interfere with my wishes, one of
them becoming unemployed after 15 years! But let us not whine about
fate. This particular email is nothing more than particular likes and
dislikes that I have had with various programming languages that I have
run across and what features about them that I think are important to
have in any new language that might be created.

MATHEMATICA

Obviously this language has it made in regards to anything having to do
with technical, analytic or mathematical programming. Most languages
(VB, C) do not have an adequate toolbox of premade math functions. While
the toolbox of Mathematica is probably too much for a general purpose
language, most other languages are not large enough. The user should not
be required to be a math major to have matrix algebra or statistical
functions available to him. Another area that Mathematica excels is in
its array processing functions. All languages should be required by law
to have those functions already available! Again, why should the user
have to continually rewrite algorithms that are constantly used in all
disciplines?

PERL

I have only fiddled with Perl a little bit, but it seems to me that the
arena in which it excels is in pattern searching of strings. Other than
that I find the language godawful to read! It is not a good sign when
the Perl journal has contests to see who can write the most
incomprehensible code. But let us give credit where credit is due, add
Perl's pattern matching to our list.

PROLOG

Now here is a unique one. There is much to grab from this language that
would make the writing of certain types of code immensely easier than it
would be otherwise. I vote strongly for including elements of logic
programming.

C

Not being a natural guru, I have found C to be a very difficult bridge
to cross. It demands so much dotting of i's and crossing of t's that I
have never really liked it very much but have to grudgingly concede its
effectiveness. Could we please make our language a little friendlier?

ASSEMBLY

God puts all his worst sinners in the 10th circle of hell where people
write code in Assembly. Can't beat it for speed however!

VB

VB's outstanding feature is the integration of the dialog boxes and
controls with the code. The event driven structure is much easier to
work with than linear programming. We need dialogs and controls.

There is another area in which most languages suffer that is not often
thought about. Most languages have virtually no vocabulary for
performing geometric operations that one would like to perform in CAD
systems. Where are the functions to give you the distance between skew
lines or tell you if points are collinear or not? I humbly suggest a
geometry vocabulary or at least a function library.

Well, that's it for now.

jeremydunn@ibm.net