Re: [dev] Interesting post about X11

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Donald Allen <donaldcallen_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> So, if we take you at your
> word, you are advocating returning to writing assembly code. As
> someone who wrote his first computer program in 1960 in assembly
> language on an IBM 1620, and who wrote an awful lot of assembly code
> in the 1960s and 1970s, I can assure you that's not a good idea.

And if we take you at your word, are you advocating that we follow
abstraction out until we're using touchscreens to drag Sprog[1]
widgets around? I sure hope not.

I think what should be pursued is a balance between abstracting out
pain-in-the-ass boilerplate (of which modern C is full) and reducing
programming to mindless library-gluing (which is what Java gave the
world). To be perfectly honest, no matter how well your Scheme program
runs, if it takes up much more system resources than existing C
programs, I don't want it. It's not just about easing the development
load by throwing hardware at the problem -- we've had enough of that.
There's no reason I need to bog down my computers with langauge
interpreters -- much less crimes against nature like emacs. There are
plenty of regular languages out there that don't need the
infrastructure scheme does, many of which have already been mentioned
in this thread.

Thanks for the book link, though -- I didn't know that was available
online these days!

-- 
# Kurt H Maier