At 11:46 AM 1/19/00 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I've faced questions of the form
>
> "What in language X corresponds to the foo feature
> of language Y?"
>
>in a variety of settings over the years (both in "real-world"
>software development and in teaching comparative programming
>languages courses). I've found it interesting (and useful) to
>respond with the question, "Why do you want to do that?"
some of this material is from
courses at being a 'change-agent'.
some of it from actual 'experience'.
this one is from the 'experiences'
of an associate of mine. He made me custodian of
a language that was in production
(IE real use) at what is now lucent.
--- things they would like you not to know...
Eventually the calico lang was kicked-out of bell labs
because this other guy was promoting
his own new "language" instead.
The competing language touted that you didn't
have to learn anything new if you didn't
want to. no new training or support requirements.
This guy (initials: B.S.) made life very painful
for the folk in the calico camp
because there was no chance old code would
stop compiling or need to be separately supported.
calico did not have a compatible syntax.
nor was it easy to mechanically translate
code or behavior by applying certain rules.
Yet the "kicked-out" language was far superior
and rebuilt from the ground up for
net usage. [ it has core support for agents
and was a light year ahead of COM/DCOM/CORBA
built in. in fact CORBA was not even a notion back then]
lucent eventually tried to distance itself
from calico. too much project sabotage going on
between the two competing camps.
they offered it to other large corps.
some nerds at sun got ahold of it and
stripped it down to use at some skunkworks
in building some interpreter.
A bit later this gosling guy pops up.
since there was little user base to dislodge
sun had no problem getting people to
adopt java in house.
lesson: if you are trying to dislodge
an entrenched language in a pre-existing codebase,
make sure can replicate behavior right down
to the bugs.
{-----}
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
