Ranga Nathan wrote: > > Here is an email I received internally regarding the shortlist of > languages for future software development. I must add that this is a > corporate environment. I responded saying that Perl has one of the richest > data structures that I know of. Strong typing is actually a bad thing as > far as I am concerned.
As a hardware geek with past life working in Ada, I can vouch for that. VHDL (Ada for hardware design) isn't much fun either. Unless you're doing life-critical design (code runs or people die) strong typing is not something you want to saddle yourself with. Does this person want a programmer whose sole job is to maintain a library of type-conversion routines so you can safely convert an integer to a boolean or string without making the type-checking barf on compile? Every Ada project I ever worked on had someone like that. > How can I rebut this arguement in a better way? > Actually, there is a hidden agenda to standardize on C# here! Ah well hidden agendas often need to be exposed to get rid of them until then, logical arguments are a waste of breath. > "I took out Perl. After looking at www.perl.org and the language more, > the main item I didn't like is that it is not type safe, there are only > three variables types ( > http://perlpod.com/5.8.4/pod/perlintro.html#Perl%20variable%20types). > Yikes! Although ti has many of the characteristics we listed, it still > seems to be used for scripting than for more robust programming. uh, though I'm not a CS major, the phrase "three variable types" seems to kind of miss the point of scalars that do the work of strings, ints, floats, booleans, and references, and downplay the power of hashes and arrays that just work out of the box. > I left in PHP, it is widely used. If we want to remove PHP, I have no > real argument, just that it's a viable language that has the > characteristics we listed. > > I added Cold Fusion as a web language. It is also a widely used web > language and has the characteristics we listed. I would prefer it more > than PHP." > > __________________________________________ > Ranga Nathan / CSG > Systems Programmer - Specialist; Technical Services; > BAX Global Inc. Irvine-California > Tel: 714-442-7591 Fax: 714-442-2840 > > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > Boston-pm@mail.pm.org > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm -- Greg London Zoran Corporation 781-638-7541 _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
