Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Dar Scott]

On Tuesday, February 10, 2004, at 10:20 AM, Frank Leahy wrote:

> BUT...I wish xTalk had some ADDITIONAL constructs that made it more 
> accessible to computer scientists and professional programmers.  Both 
> because without them xTalk look amateurish, and therefore less likely 
> to be used by professionals, and because it would make it 
> significantly easier to port code from other languages to xTalk.

In my mind I am not separating xTalk from Transcript from Revolution.  
What is more important to me is a clean, bug-free, complete 
implementation.  It is a toy implementation that makes something look 
amateurish.  RunRev has always had a commitment to fixing bugs and 
recently has been able to increase resources to that end.  That is what 
removes the amateurish look.

The amateurish look can show up anywhere.  I recently worked with Java 
and was surprised that writeln to a tcp link would push twice, once for 
the text and once for the crlf.  That is amateurish and it has nothing 
to do with the syntax.  This is not a bug as far as I know, but it is a 
tiny performance hit and a pain in debugging.

(I wonder.  Would Scheme or Haskell or Modula or other languages look 
amateurish?)

Dar Scott