johnc@plx.UUCP (John C.) (06/28/90)
In article <5281@stpstn.UUCP> andyk@stpstn.UUCP (Andy Klapper) writes: > One thing that I would like to know is why you feel that simple languages > friendly to the neophyte programmer cannot be used in the large commercial > projects ? I always thought simple & elegant was better than complex and > and confused. When my code gets big and complex I don't want to be fighting > with the structures and syntax that a language forces on me. On the other > hand I don't want to have to fight with a language to let me do something > that I need to do. (I admit it, I want everything !) Some languages "friendly to the neophyte programmer" (Plexus' 4GL as an example) let you have it both ways by providing an "escape hatch" into a lower-level, but more powerful, language (C, in our case). The 4GL is great for rapid development of a windowed, GUI-based document image data processing application with SQL database interface (*whew!*), but it is (by design) inappropriate for writing a custom widget event handler. Customers with such a need typically have teams of several people using 4GL to code 95% of the application, with one or two also skilled enough in C to use the escape mechanism for the rest. As I see it, such extensibility features free you from having to see the tool in "all or nothing" terms; an "80/20" (or better yet, "95/5") approach becomes relevant. Actually, my comment applies wherever code developed (or automatically generated) with one tool can call code developed using a lower level language. This is the case with MS-DOS and also, I believe, with Unix. -- John Ciccarelli Plexus Software, 5200 Great America Pkwy, Suite 200, Santa Clara CA 95054 email: ...sun!plx!johnc, voice: 408-982-4842, fax: 408-727-4864