OpenEuphoria

Re: Ken's abrasiveness

• Posted by Jason Gade <jaygade at yah?o?com> May 29, 2008
• 746 views

c.k.lester wrote:
> 
> Jason Gade wrote:
> > 
> > And some of us will continuously fight against the inclusion of misfeatures,
> > as we see them, and the pollution of the language, until we tire of arguing
> > and leave this place too.
> 
> Jason, I'm somewhat in the minimalist camp, with a caveat: if an added feature
> is not going to negatively impact the performance of the interpreter, I
> generally don't have a problem with its inclusion. For instance, I'm totally
> against GOTO being added to the language, but if it doesn't negatively
> affect the performance (read: speed) of the interpreter, then I'm not going
> to put up a big fight about it.
> 
> I wonder, too, about bloating the interpreter... but with today's hardware,
> that's not really an issue.
> 
> So, while I share your concerns for Euphoria, I don't think we're at a point
> where we are seeing its assimilation into the programmer collective. It's
> still unique and fast and useful.

It's not like I'm against /every/ feature, I'm trying to make that clear. And
I'm not so much in the "bloating the interpreter" camp or in the "slowing down
the interpreter" camp because these days it just doesn't really matter that much.
Clear code is far more important.

Maybe it's just pie-in-the-sky idealism, but for me it has more to do with the
overall look and feel of the language, which features /should/ be included
because they fit the philosophy of the language and which are just the syntactic
sugar flavor-of-the-week.

I think there should be a compelling reason to add anything --feature or new
built-in-- to the interpreter, and a broad consensus as well. Not just "because
it's cool."

Same rant, different day I guess.

Heh, for true minimalism and performance I guess I can always just stick with C.

But allow me to make a comparison -- in some ways, going from C (a beautiful
language, IMO, missing some features) to C++ (not so beautiful, lots of
little-used features) introduced a lot of power and expressiveness at the expense
of a lot of clunkiness and ugliness. And some missing features remain missing, or
at least non standard. I'd like to avoid that here.

--
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple
system that works.
--John Gall's 15th law of Systemantics.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming."
--C.A.R. Hoare

j.