English Like?

[Bob Sneidar]

I'll bite. One of the reasons that the heartbleed bug passed muster was because the code OpenSSL is written in is *not* easily human readable. It's hard enough to spot a bug in LC script. Being human readable makes it tolerable to debug by reading through code. 

The first time I encountered x = "123" in FoxPro, I thought to myself, "Is that a test that returns true or false? If so where is the result stored?" It isn't the least bit intuitive. And FoxPro/dBase WAS a scripting language, but they were inexorably tied to prior language conventions like Pascal, or else they feared "real programmers" would not adopt it. 

There is also the issue of pride. Everyone wants to think the decisions they made are the "best" decision that could have been made at the time. To acknowledge there *might* have been something better, or just other, that they could have adopted is personally offensive to some. To suggest it might be easier to develop in Livecode when they already are proficient in C or Java might seem like a criticism of past choices to many. 

Finally there is the fear of the unknown. The greatest difficuly I have trying to teach people how to work with OS X, is that having spent all the time and effort learning Windows, they imagine the same time and effort will be required to learn OS X. Of course anyone who knows both operating systems knows that is an irrational fear. Most of the things you learn about either OS is common to both. The same applies to software development. The principles are all in place. It's convention that differs. 

Bob S