What's your favorite year end method?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>>    
>>
>>>I have no intention of starting a language flame war here, and I've
>>>been doing this for long enough (43 years professionally) to know this
>>>is a religious issue. I'd just hate to see this project repeat a past
>>>mistake. My $.02.
>>>      
>>>
>>And
>>
OK, here's MY two cents.

How about a "requirement" that whatever language is chosen have been 
around for at least 10-20 years? Proven its usefulness over time and not 
just the latest fad in programming languages.

The reality is that any "complete" computer language can do anything 
that any other complete language can do. But the ease depends upon the 
exact nature of the problem at hand and whether the nature of the the 
problem at hand will be constant (or an unknown quantity changing over 
time). The less you know (about the problem) at the point you must make 
the language choice the more sensible the choice one of the truly 
"general" languages like LISP is.

I would need to review LISP (and replace my LISP books lost in the fire) 
and would probably want something about the Scheme dialect (and Guile) 
before delving into reports but that would be true as well with any of 
the "fad" languages like Perl or Python(which might be great, might end 
up becoming the next Fortran, COBOL or C --- but I could name a dozen 
languages most of you have never heard of  that were highly touted in 
the period say 1970-1990.

Understand what I am saying? The need to learn LISP vs having plenty of 
people who know Perl or Python is somewhat of an illusion. Based on my 
past experience (low percentage of fad languages that survive) down the 
road I would expect the have exactly the same need to have people learn 
Perl or Python. Nor are we actually talking about learning LISP so well 
as to be real LISP programmers (correct me if I am mistaken, but just 
writing/manipulating reports not likely to be getting into serious LISP 
stuff).

Michael