2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice AwardsThis forum is for the 2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards.
You can now vote for your favorite products of 2008. This is your chance to be heard! Voting ends February 12th.
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I wanted to vote for Javascript, and could not…
Javascript has seen a boost in performance with real-time engines this year, and a boost in usage with many more “web*2” sites (Ajax included).
I hate Javascript with a passion. It makes VB6 or ASP.Net look like paragons of elegance. It's a hack that was created over beer and pizza late one Friday night over at Netscape, and it looks it. IMHO, Javascript is just about everything a language *shouldn't* be.
Yet...
It's totally unavoidable, and totally indispensible. It's a cornerstone of some of the most interesting/innovative software being written today.
I agree: Javascript should be one the list. And could well be a contender for the #1 spot!
Javascript isn't as bad as people think it is. Unfortunately, far too few programmers actually learnt to use it the proper way, by forgetting the '90's JS, and learning structured unobtrusive JS instead.
w00t? No fortran, Pascal, BASIC, or even Snobol? (lol, snobol... the language that was dead before it started, or, the cp/m of programming languages, or... well, you get it. )
lol, snobol... the language that was dead before it started
If you mean it was originally intended as a research platform, rather than a practical number cruncher like FORTRAN, then OK -- you're almost right.
I trust you have read the SNOBOL Wikipedia article. Permit me one short quotaton from that article:
Quote:
SNOBOL was quite widely taught in larger US universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s as a text manipulation language in the humanities.
snobol4
One of the most interesting, original, and influential languages of the 1960s, SNOBOL was designed around string-processing, pattern-matching, and textual transformation. Like many other one-idea languages (TRAC, APL) it was extremely powerful and elegant within its problem domain, but weak outside it (there also seems to be a law that such languages must have obscure syntax). It strongly influenced UNIX regular expression notation.
If it ain't regular expressions, it ain't no good. - LES
Les's ideas are no better than his grammar. The only advantage of regular expressions over Snobol pattern matching and Icon string scanning is that regular expressions are very terse. Perhaps because of their terseness, they quickly become unreadable as they become more complex. Pattern matching and string scanning are far more powerful, are quicker to write, and are far easier to debug. One writer said that if you have a problem and you solve it with a regular expression, you end up with two problems. If you need to do anything complex with strings, your best bet is Icon string scanning. Larry
This last one tells me why I get a horrible déjà vu of "There used to be a better way." when I can't write a regex to do what I want, or when I see a particularly nasty obscure regex (esp. in a Perl script).
Quick, what does: 's/\/\/\//\/\//' do? Edit: added smiley
Last edited by archtoad6; 02-13-2009 at 08:50 AM..
Reason: add smiley
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Edit: added smiley
