[FoRK] Open source PowerShell clone available

[Simon Wistow]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:16:17AM -0700, Zee Roe said:
> So what language(s) had positive adjectives associated with them?

A few months ago I happened to be sitting on a plane next to a language 
researcher from Cambridge who conformed to all known stereotypes for 
"beardy weirdies". 

Anyway - we chatted briefly and I provided my geek credentials in the 
standard social protocol negotiations viz. that I have written compilers 
in the past and have even written my own DSLs. That I new about type 
safety and auto boxing and duck typing and covariance and Monads and all 
that malarkey but confessed that I did the bulk of my programming in 
Perl. 

"You probably hate me" [ laugh ]
"No, just everything you stand for"

I swear to god there was not a single flicker of humour in his response, 
no hint of a smile, no amusing inflection of voice.

I plowed on.

It became clear tat he felt no virtue in any scripting language 
whatsoever, in fact no language that couldn't be "proved" and that such 
monstrosities were abominations yea unto the eyes of Knuth himself. 

It also transpired that the largest program he'd written was about 2000 
lines long and was used by no-one other researchers. It had taken a 
while to write he admitted.

He saw no benefits in rapid prototyping, in flexiblility, in 
expressiveness. It was quite weird to hear.

I gave a talk at an IA conference many years ago about the difference 
between 'techies' (as the IAs kept calling anyone from the IT guy to the 
DBA to the programmer to the Sys Admin) and them.  One of the things I 
tried to point out is that they deal with the 80% - the norm. Don't 
cram all the functionality you can in, just the stuff that most people 
will use. Programmers deal with the edge cases - what happens when 
someone with the name "O'Reilly; DELETE FROM users;" comes along. It 
infects our thinking - it's why we build UIs like we do with thousands 
of options covering every eventuality. 

When I user group I'm on started talking about having a who's who page 
to help at meetings there were endless discussions about what qualified 
you to go on the page - did you have to post to the mailing list, what 
about IRC? Should you have gone to a meeting? 2 meetings? Should we have 
a rudimentary CMS in order to faciliate the potential influx of people?

In the end I just said "Mail me your details" and lo, as predicted, only 
the people who cared sent mails and there was no massive swamping 
influx.

I'm not entirely sure what point I'm sauntering towards other than - 
what the Language Researchers often tend to forget is that whilst having 
everthing be correct is good, a certain amount of pragmatism is needed 
make things *useful*.