[OT] Cross-platform tools shootout

[Geoff Canyon]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 10:36 AM, Mark Wilcox <m_p_wilcox at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

> developers using it had much lower expectations



There's a huge blub<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programmer)#Blub>issue
here. Of course most people think their language is pretty good. Most
don't know any better, and those who do likely moved on.

The only people who are (somewhat) suited to judge a language are those who
can judge it relative to another language, and then only the relative
difference between the two languages.

I can say, for example, that LC's IDE kicks ass compared to PHP, but only
for the PHP IDEs I've seen.

I can say that LC's math libraries *really* need bignum and arbitrary
precision integer math compared to J.

I can say that J's ability to handle arbitrary arrays kicks ass over LC,
RB, PHP, Ruby, Python... everything I've ever used. Same thing with their
power functions, and inverse functions (*that* will bake your noodle).

I can say that FileMaker's label abstraction destroys every other tool I've
used.

LISP macros (in my limited understanding) kick major ass, and I am *soooo*
looking forward to having something similar with open language.

But it's much harder to say how LC rates on a scale of 1-10.