On Monday, August 22, 2016 at 3:48:49 AM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > Lawrence D’Oliveiro : > > > On Monday, August 22, 2016 at 2:20:39 AM UTC+12, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > >> ... can heartily recommend SCons. > > > > It’s Python 2 only, not Python 3. > > And? SCons is very good, definitely beats make. It also illustrates the > use of a real programming language for special applications (as opposed > to ad hoc rules). > > The flawed thinking behind rules is often expressed like this: We want > rules because not everybody is a programmer. > > However, with rules, not even a programmer knows how to configure the > thing.
The same thing said from flip side: Programmers think programming (or is it programmering?) is kewl Maybe… Maybe not… All of us, even supposedly educated/intelligent, can suffer from the hammer-nail effect with our hammer being general purpose programming (languages) It occurs to me that a general-purpose rule system was created decades ago — prolog That it did not take off maybe just a question of maturity and not something intrinsically wrong with the concept Personal Note: In a major curriculum revision of 1990 I canvassed vigorously for using lisp instead of C,C++,Pascal etc to teach programming. I was booed/shooed out. One could say I was simply delirious Or that I was some 25 years ahead of the time with Lisp-practicalized being spelt ‘python’ There are so many things that we dont notice that make for bridging the gap between being theoretically neat and practically usable: - good docs - runs OTB - Or at least easy to install - C interface That said, I dont like prolog — more imperative than classic imperative programming And full proper logic ie full first order logic without abominations like cut and with full quantifier generality is uncomputable ie this may also be a pipe-dream. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
