[Tutor] Java: (and python ?) nearer measles than coffee

[Danny Yoo]

>> some more people are looking for a mnemonic-language which should 
>> optimized cross-compile to something with multiplatform-capability like 
>> Java. Please let me know, if I am entirely wrong.
>
> I'm not really sure what you are asking. Many people find Python to be
> useful and enjoyable for a wide variety of personal and professional
> programming. But if you are happy with Basic and Cobol and they meet
> your needs then there is no need to "waste your time" learning anything
> else, I suppose.

I want to support Kent in this.  We're not language bigots.  (In fact, I'm 
not really much of a Python programmer at the moment.  *grin*)

I have no idea what a mnemonic language should be: perhaps you're talking 
about domain-specific languages in the sense discussed in:

     http://www.ddj.com/184405575

In which case, one argument for learning Python or any other general 
purpose language is to know the necessary tools to write the 
domain-specific language you want.  That is, the point of a general 
purpose language is to "bootstrap": to give us enough tools to build our 
way up to the domain.

If someone's already done that work, then yes, of course, use the 
domain-specific language.  If I'm doing some kind of simple text 
processing, then Perl's probably a good choice, because that language has 
a lot of built-in support for text munging.  If I need to do something 
with database management, I'd be silly if I didn't take a close look at an 
SQL implementation first.

But if I'm writing a simulator for elevator systems, I might be in for 
some work.  It's unlikely that someone has written a domain-specific 
language for ascending platforms, and I'm probably going to have to 
bootstrap my way up from a general purpose language (like Python or Perl 
or Ruby or Java or Scheme or ...) so that I can eventually talk about the 
problem in the natural terms of my domain.

And if a language helps me claw up that much more quickly, then that's a 
very good reason for me to learn that new language.  That's the claim of 
high-level, general purpose languages: we don't learn them just for their 
own sake, but because they help us build the tools we need to get to the 
real interesting problems.