English Like?

[Lagi Pittas]

Bob,

You forget right upto Visual Foxpro 9, Fox still was backwards compatible
with Dbase 2 and still had the STORE statement.

STORE A TO B
STORE 1+15 to C
STORE 5 to a,b,,c,d
STORE "HELLO" to message

The HC and DBASE way  is the logical way to do it for mere mortals,  but
when the whole computer has  4K WORDS of magnetic backing store (IBM 704
that FORTRAN  was written on) you have to use concise syntaxt - a=b instead
of put a into B a 25% of the characters in this case.

Secondly if your output is paper -  Teletype 33 - 10 characters a second ,
that is another reason.

WE do things not because they are the best way but because in the past
there were limitations we have forgotten about.

To paraphrase  Max Planck:-

A programming  language does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Regards Lagi



On 24 May 2017 at 18:54, Bob Sneidar via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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