[OT] If programming languages were religions...

[Andre Garzia]

Irgh, I got lost while reading this thread. Question, wasn't the
language called transcript?

xTalk is not a language is a set of common characteristics shared by
HyperTalk, MetaTalk, SuperTalk and friends... if xTalk was a language
then find me a xTalk interpreter, compiler. There's no such thing.
xTalk was an idea to bring together all similar things and find a
common ground, like they did with common lisp (Remember the joke about
practical common lisp being as practical and common as the holy roman
empire was holy and an empire...)

and by the way, transcript or metatalk or revolution or whichever we
call it today, is as turing complete as C, Lisp, Smalltalk and others,
so please don't tell me that as a language it fails somewhere because
it does not. Now if you want to talk about spread and commonness of
Runtime Revolution product in comparison of other languages, then
don't push the discussion towards language taxonomy or
semantics/syntax because it does not make sense!

You can complain about lack of widgets and libraries.
You can complain about iPhone, Flash, Amiga, RISC PC, Toaster support
(my pet peeve is BSD support)
You can complain about it being so easy that film school graduates can
code professional apps with no formal CS education
You can complain about not being able to create your own Operating
System with Revolution
But you simply can't say that the scripting language (syntax +
semantics) doesn't compare with C, APL, Whatever... because that
simply ain't true.

Yes we can code a full blown OS with C, we can revolutionize the world
with SmallTalk, we can rover around mars with Lisp but it took me 2
months to create a full blown network preferences application in C/C++
for Haiku (BeOS like system), the same work would take a week maximum
with Revolution (and this include building the C external for the I/O
network card stuff). So how do we measure the success of a language?
How do we compare them? The answer is simple: We Don't!!! To each
their own, my uncle who's a naval engineer still using Fortran 77,
some masochi^H^H^H^H^H^H coders still use PERL and will not trade it
for anything. I am fond of Lisp and wish I they sold plush parentheses
so I could put them on my office desk. The thing is, people use what
they know and for them that is the best option. Saying that Revolution
doesn't rank as well as $LANGUAGE$ doesn't mean anything. Ask Chipp,
Trevor or Richard about deploying solutions in Rev instead of C... You
might get the impression that C doesn't rank as well as Revolution,
which would also be false, since both are turing complete and very
competent at their own niche, Revolution being in the business
empowering the developers with an sane language easy to learn and
maintain and C being in the business of leaking memory^H^H^H^H low
level stuff.

all languages are fine...