> Anyway, all of John's recent papers have migrated with him to
>
> http://www.scriptics.com/people/john.ousterhout/
His 'Scripting: Higher-Level Programming for the 21st Century.' paper,
available here, is IMO excellent, and I keep recommending it to all
and sundry. As a defence, obviously.
I'm amazed by the number of networking people I know who understand
the necessity for layers of abstraction in the network stack, but who
don't see a similar need for clear levels of programming abstraction
in the programming structure, and who chant fashionable 'java...
c++... object-oriented' tat. Being object-oriented by itself is not
enough.
As if millions of potential programmers are going to learn java, where
the libraries still yet aren't, or the overfeatured monstrosity that
is c++, where code reuse will never happen on a global public scale
and it's so easy to build things all wrong. (They're all learning asp
instead. Never mind the implementation details, feel the code reuse!)
I'm also amazed by the sheer number of people I've met who profess to
hate Tcl. It can do accurate arithmetic, and with Tk it beats the hell
out of the Athena Motif widget set. And these days it's even Y2K
compliant. Okay, some of the language constructs aren't conventional,
but...
is now frozen as of April 17; grab the tcl browser plugin from here.
Easier than playing with Sun's java SDK, although not awfully solid
yet.
L.
<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.sat-net.com/L.Wood/>+44-1483-300800x3641