J Kenneth King wrote: <snipple> > c) This has nothing to do with programming languages. A programmer that > lacks critical thinking is a bad programmer. The language they use has > no bearing on such human facilities.
The language may well have a bearing on the quality of the programs generated though, which is what most people care about. A dolt writing in python is far less likely to write a program that bluescreens the users machine than a comparative dolt writing the same program in C or assembler. Of course two gurus writing in different languages would produce equally good results but gurus are considered gurus by virtue of their scarcity. Back in the real world the further into dolthood you venture, the more the more important the design of the language becomes to the quality of outputs you can expect to get from your code monkeys. Take 100 perfectly average programmers and give them the same programs to write in a variety of languages, you will get higher quality results from some languages than others i.e. not all languages are equal. I think it's fair to say the ones that give the best results encourage good coding and the ones that give the worst results encourage bad coding. If you don't believe it's possible to have a language that encourages bad coding practices consider this one I just made up, I call it Diethon.. It's entirely the same as Python 2.6 except that any syntax errors that happen within class definitions cause the interpreter to send offensive emails to everyone in your contacts list and then delete your master boot record. Unsurprisingly users of this language are reluctant to try to create object oriented code and resort to ugly struct and list based paradigms instead. Roger. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
