[geeks] forking stupid interpreters

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, March 25, 2002 at 11:14:40 (+0000), David Cantrell wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] forking stupid interpreters
>
> This is over-simplistic.  The vast majority of spam I get is neither from
> known spammers nor from open relays.

You must not be using the right lists of open relays and known spammers
then.  I run domains that have been extreme spam targets for many years
and lately I've been down to one or two direct spams per mailbox per
week.  I complain about these to the right people and they go away too.

> You would do well to read the study at:
>   http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer2000.pdf

An interesting study indeed!  Perhaps in return you'd read "The Practice
Of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike.  Lots of good and practical
advice in there about language selection.  Much of the comparative data
is similar, but I think some of the advice and conclusions might be
somewhat more pragmatic.

I'm somewhat stunned that they consider Java to not be a scripting
language, despite the fact it's implemented and used that way almost
exclusively as far as I can see.  That way of looking at things
certainly seems to colour their conclusions a _lot_.

It's too bad Smalltalk and perhaps some OO scripting language like Ruby
were not included in their study.

You should try to remember you're talking to a C _and_ Smalltalk
programmer here!  ;-)

In fact I've been a student of computer language design all along.....

> although he also says that the results may not be generalisable to
> different applications from that which he was testing with.

Indeed:

	"It must be emphasized that the results are valid for the
	phonecode problem only; generalizing to different application
	domains would be haphazard."

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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