[SLL] OSS commerce

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2007, Glenn Stone wrote:
>On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 02:39:52PM -0800, Rob Smith wrote:
>>In reply to your quote, I call bullshit. A majority of programmers are
>>exposed to basic first. There is no reason to feel that basic (or any
>>other language) 'taints the mind' of anyone. Programming is about
>>logic and theory. The language you pick is purely a implementation
>>detail. Way too many people forget that it's called computer science
>>for a reason...

Yes, it's possible to right good code regardless of language.  Some
languages make the job easier than others.

While programming may be about logic and theory, applications are about
often solving problems for business, science, etc., and used by people who
aren't programmers.  Many of the accounting systems I've seen over the 41+
years I've been in the business appear to have been written by people who
don't have a clue about basic accounting and bookkeeping systems nor how
they're actually used.

My degree isn't CS, but Physics and Math, and I learned to program to solve
real world problems, initially scientific analysis, then accounting systems
for a Navy contractor in the D.C. area where I was an Operations Research
Analyst.  I automated much of their accounting and office systems, usually
doing the data entry myself (80 column pucnh cards) for the first month or
so to make sure things worked properly, and, being lazy, to make data entry
as easy and error-free as possible.

I founded Celestial after managing Radio Shack Computer Centers and being
V.P. of Finance and Admin of a software company in Seattle, developing
accounting systems for similar busineses because I didn't find any
multi-user accounting software available that wasn't crap (many such as the
RealWorld system more suitable for accountants doing write-up than
real-time use in a business).

An excellent book on human computer interaction is Alan Cooper's ``The
Inmates Are Running the Asylum''.

>I think it depends upon the programmer-wannabe's mindset.  I was exposed to
>both BASIC and FORTRAN before formally becoming a CS major, both of which
>the theory guys seem to have a phobia about.  I have a sneaking suspicion
>that part of it has to do with the dreaded GOTO (fnord).  I took to more
>rational forms of programming (Pascal, sh/bash, Perl) fairly easily, but
>there were some who were confused to the point where one actually said to
>one of my colleagues, "But I thought FORTRAN was just BASIC shifted over
>seven columns!"  OTOH, they wouldn't even teach us C as undergrads; we had
>to go over to the engineering school just to get that... we did our homework
>in Pascal or, if we got really wound up, Ada.  (I never got that far up in
>the app stack; I preferred to do my "serious" work in assembler.)

My first language was Mishewaka FORTRAN on the Bendix G-20, then G-20
Assembly, then ALGOL 60 on GE Timesharing systems.  The early versions of
BASIC were restricted to 2 character variable names while FORTRAN's were 6
characters.  The only reason I could see for using BASIC was to use its
built-in matrix operations (something that Bill Gates left out of his BASIC
-- perhaps because he didn't understand the math :-).

>I think the point is that there are languages that make it easy (or easier)
>to hurt yourself in (BASIC, FORTRAN, C without Lint); there also seem to be
>codebases that are buggier than most (older versions of Sendmail and BIND).
>PHP seems to be both at the same time.  Personally I'm more than a little
>mistrustful of code that can modify itself... among other things.  
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Criticism
>
>I suspect Bill is going to throw the Python card here any second now, but
>I'll let him do that, since I've not actually written in Python (yet)... 

Over the years I've used FORTRAN, Assembly, ALGOL, BPL (Burroughs
Programming Language), COBOL, C, perl, python, as well as the usual *nix
utilities to develop large commercial systems.

I first learned python as Zope and Plone are written in it, and it was the
logical choice to use.  Initially I didn't like it's lack of braces, but
I've really come to prefer python for most development as it's clean, has
good object oriented design, and works well developing large systems.

Personally I don't like much of the php that I've had to work with,
debugging, extending, etc. as I find it hard to read with the display code
intermingled with processing, and ugly (in the same way perl is) with all
the ``$'' and similar characters required on variable names.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be
privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to
corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.
    -- George Bernard Shaw