What's your favorite year end method?

[Derek Atkins]

"Donald Allen" <donaldcallen at gmail.com> writes:

>> And which "past mistake" would that be?  I'm not trying to start
>> a religious war, either, I'm just trying to understand where you're
>> coming from and what you mean.
>
> Because people aren't paid the big bucks to work on gnucash, the
> project is perhaps more vulnerable to turnover than commercial
> projects, where people can be held onto with financial incentives that
> take years to vest. So while I think code readability is important in
> any setting, it's particularly important here.

There's no way of knowing what language will be in vogue a decade
from now.

> I think Scheme was a mistake precisely because there are relatively
> few people who are "fluent" in it (I will, of course, defend the
> semantic and even syntactic beauty of the language to the death :-).
> There may also be a performance issue with this particular
> implementation (guile), but that's irrelevant to this discussion.

At the time it was chosen all of the developers knew scheme,
and many of the people around the program also knew it, so it
was certainly an appropriate choice.  I wouldn't call it a
mistake.  Guile is also the "GNU Extension Language", so that's
yet another reason to have chosen in.

> I think Perl could be a mistake because it's so easy to write
> inscrutable code in it. Yes, there are far more people who know Perl
> than Scheme, as you correctly point out, but I think the outcome could
> well be the same (I've seen this with people implementing large
> systems in Tcl, which is just not suitable for that sort of thing).
> That's what I'm worried about.

I think it's easy to write inscrutable code in any language.
I consider python inscrutable too, but I consider Scheme
elegant and (usually) quite clear.  It's all about what you
know and what you're comfortable with.  I've also seen
PERL code that's more understandable that C.

It's not a question of what the language allows.  It's all about
how the programmer uses it.

>> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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