Abstraction, natural language and linguistics. was Re: [Gllug] Website developement

[David Freeman]

 --- Alex Hudson <hudson_a at alexhudson.com> wrote: > On Sun, 15 Jul
2001, David Freeman wrote:
> > ARRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!
> > PERL!!! NO!
> > 
> > Why is it everyone thinks perl is so great?
> 
> Where do we begin?

In the beginning is the normal place, but this doesn't necessaryily
make it the best place.
 
> > its a write only language! Horibble! Give me C or Java or LISP any
> > day!
> 
> Perl is higher level than both C and Java, probably also Lisp (I only
> have
> experience of Scheme). Perl comes with masses of fantastic libraries.
> perl
> -T makes it easy to write secure CGI. CPAN allows you to get on with
> the
> business of programming the application, not the support libraries.
> Perl
> has auto-vivification. There is more than one way to do things. It
> can be
> object oriented, or not. It integrates with everything. And, Perl 6
> will
> rock. Don't cuss it until you've realised you're wrong :P

Higher level language.

answer a question. What is english?

Its a high level language used by humans to comunicate and process
information.

Whats a programming language? a high level language used by computers
to comunicate and to process information.

What is the bigest problem with english?

Syntatic sugar, redundancy. With languages of this higher level and
with so many ways of doing things we introduce redundancy and remove
some of the strictness that was originally in the language. Thus we can
reduce a whole sentence to something as basic as 

Me need chocolate. 

And you all understand it, there is no real abiquity. And this is what
you get with computer languages, a very simple sparse language with
little redundency and little syntatic sugar. And this IMHO is its
strength. 

So the moment you increase the level of abstraction of a language and
expand it it becomes like human language and is abusable, and complex.

And thus we sumerise the reasons while perl isn't as great as we all
think.

And yes I did try learning it.

> BTW - back on topic - web design comes down to two schools of
> thought. The
> first is separate presentation from content, which is where templates
> (et
> al) come in. Hold the data in a database, generate the pages live
> from a
> template. This works great for big sites (100+ pages), but kind of
> sucks
> for small sites (it's boring as hell). The other one is to not
> separate
> presentation from content - this is called design, is bloody hard
> work,
> but gives the best results. Most small sites are somewhere in
> between.

I am going to go with the idea of using gcc and the C preprocessor, its
eactly what I want.

Thanks

D
 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alex.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
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