Re: [9fans] A Discipline of Programming

[Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 12:26:31 +0200, lucio@proxima.alt.za
<lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
> No doubt there is a middle road, but it is not in widespread use yet
> (Limbo?).

It's a stretch of the imagination to call me a programmer, and I'm not
familiar with the book, but  I think there are good examples out there
of the middle of the road, and Limbo is one.

I used to program in Oberon (which is less popular in the New World,
especially back when I was doing it), and certain aspects of using it
that I always enjoyed I find in Java and Limbo and a handful of other
languages now, and even languages like Python bring an interesting
flavor to the mix.  It's not so much the middle of the road, but that
so much lands firmly either in the practical or the theorhetical that
when you find something well done *and* handy it's a novelty.

I think the C represented in Plan 9 is not the C you find elsewhere
(or at least anymore), and the Plan 9 folk (philosophy?) has done a
nice job of striking that balance.  Even some of the earlier
trash-talking around the Links web browser code comes back to this
subjective idea of what C is and should be.

Unfortunately, the practicality of the New World also means that we
don't always value history, because next week it'll be Visual Basic
2008 and GTK++ with all of it's inherited baggage, and a thousand
otherwise bright programmers will either reinvent the wheel to avoid
the horrors (or the history), or slap another patch on the middens of
the previous generation to keep the wheel turning.

-Jack