Mark - 

Well, to quote the article, "Of course, Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped lay the conceptual framework for the modern digital computer, proved long ago that every computer language is, in theory, essentially equivalent to every other". 

(makes me wonder what Adager would look like written in COBOL ;-) ) 

Closer to the point some of these new languages today seem to be the "language du jour" - 

"What motivates people behind these efforts? Sometimes it's commercial. Both Ruby on Rails and Ajax were developed by small software consulting companies eager to let the world know about their skills"

It's driving managers of large companies nuts trying to keep wide standards in their Dept 

Of course you make valid points Mark and within the larger construct of fairly mainstream languages yours is a valid statement. 

But there are apparently a lot of "du jour" languages springing up....

Getting back to middle aged forgetfulness, what was that language Borland was hyping in the 80s (of course) that they claimed dealt with artificial intelligence and was destined to take over the world? 

Bill
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark Landin 
  To: William L. Brandt 
  Cc: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 7:49 PM
  Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Wall Street Journal Artical on computer language proliferation





  On 12/14/05, William L. Brandt <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
    Anybody read this?

    Interesting article - in essence they said that there has been an explosion
    of languages - many needlessly - to the consternation of Microsoft which
    would like to control software developers. 

  Define "needlessly".

  Writing languages is not easy. A new language is always born in part due to desperation, because their authors can't solve problems the way they want to with the tools that were available at the time. (Or the rare case where the author just wants to see if some epiphany or insight they had about solving computing problems can be encapsulated in some semantic construct). In either case, one cannot say that a new language was created needlessly or flippantly.

  I completely disagree that there are "too many languages". They each have their strengths and weaknesses, their elegances and their kludges. A problem that's solved by 4 lines of Perl may take 30 lines of COBOL to solve, and another problem may require 4 lines of FORTRAN but 60 lines of Python. People are all different, and so some languages, and their paradigms, just fit their brains better than others. 





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