In 35+
years of using PL/I I have yet to see an instance in any
application area where it was not a match for languages
specialized for that area as well as a match for their
performance.
"...Nature likes variety. We all know of the bad effects of
monoculture in the garden and in operating systems. Why
should it be any different for development tools?..."
You keep thinking there's such a thing as nature and that this
thing has a preference to have more than one thing occurring.
Of course, the physicists insist that all that variety results
from an exceedingly smaller number of elementary particles
or wavicles. You would think "nature" would have insisted on
a greater number of particles.
"Why should it be any different for development?" If you
mean software development, then your variety argument
disappears out the window. For all things software and
hardware for use by software "nature" has decreed a
monoculture known as formal logic. "Nature" gives no
recognition in this arena to anything else.
So if you have one formal logic and one language which
encompasses it entirely, you have no need for any other. Of
course, nothing prevents you from having multiple such
languages, if variety has some sort of esoteric appeal.
However, it has no such requirement in the logical sense of
necessary and sufficient.
So "nature" does not always like variety, specifically when it
comes to software development involving logic. As we have
no software development not involving logic that gives us
closure.
"...Promoting SL/1 as a some sort of N+1 generation
developer's assistant is reasonable as long as one maintains
some connection with reality. Each new IDE generation offers
to deal with more of the repetitive details at a more abstract
level. ..."
First provide us with an example of an IDE which encompasses
all five stages of the SDP. If it doesn't, it either misnames or
misinforms relative to subset it supports instead of the entire
development process. The closest thing of which I am aware
in practice is the Rational IDE now under the IBM umbrella.
Unfortunately OO technology sucks. So having a more
comprehensive tool for a bad choice only prolongs the
misery...and mistake.
The continued IDE enhancements you mention support the
basic guidelines of "let people do what software cannot and
software what people need not". Fortunately the DA is a
complete IDE, covering everything from gathering
requirements through all five SDP stages. As that as currently
specified it remains light years ahead of current IDEs and their
planned enhancements. I will, of course, retract this claim in
part when the first one of them supports both interpretive
and compiled output...or the input and output of multiple
external procedures...or the use of a data
repository/directory...or the use of a database instead of file
management...or...
I do thank you as another source to point out to Peter that
anything he codes is specifiable. He's having some difficulty in
grasping that. Must be because he is manipulating numeric
components in the manner you suggest without using PL/I,
which he claims he has but does not use. Maybe we can get
him to offer it up to some other SCOUG member who doesn't
want to pursue him down the path of doing extra work.
As a final note related to our current effort in the
programming SIG where we want to address the problem of
program language varieties used in open source, functioning
as an inhibitor to many when it comes to participating in
writing source. "Nature" may like variety, but apparently to
many it's a turn-off. Maybe we're just not nature lovers.
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