I've tried and tried, but I don't have the will to bite my tongue any longer.. * Orion Edwards <orion(a)coke.net.nz> [2004-04-28 05:25]:
except for godawful things like lisp and haskell, but those are rarely used outside of academia.
LISP is anything but godawful. Haskell is not very well suited to applications, which does indeed limit its use outside academia, but is not at all godawful either. They're not made for writing hardware drivers, operating systems kernels, firmware, or other such stuff in, of course. They're very highlevel languages, not systems programming languages. But (far from only) my opinion is that writing applications in systems programming languages like C or C++ is simply madness for anything non-trivial, unless you happen to be a masochist. A very highlevel language (yes, like LISP) is much better suited for tasks like that. Java is a bastard child, systems programming language on the outside, and more of very highlevel language on the inside; in my eyes, you get the worst of both worlds, though to someone who has been using honest to god systems programming languages it must seem like a godsend. For systems programming, I'd stick to plain C. -- Regards, Aristotle "If you can't laugh at yourself, you don't take life seriously enough."