Resurection Time?

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Time for some new approaches certainly: I will say right away I am in no position to comment on scientific programming.

However, I am growing more and more convinced that the dominance of functional-procedural languages needs to be overthrown. They really haven't met the promises they have made and have severely hampered the development of more generic approaches to programming. When a C, C++ or Java programmer sees a problem their immediate response is to throw a problem specific function or method at it, we have thus ended up with impenetrable forests of classes, methods and functions as exemplified in the various foundation classes for Java and C++ and of course in the Windows API.

It would I think be a much more interesting and useful project for Sun to implement an imperative, declarative language as a complementary alternative to Java. Chris Date and Hugh Darwen's Tutorial D springs to mind as the most obvious candidate. There is no Unix implementation available as yet.

The field of logic programming has been very sadly neglected and D offers data definition and manipulation, rule definition and event handling all in one language. It is certainly an example of a language where you can concentrate very clearly on the problem you have to solve and not on the technical intricacies of the computer.

Furthermore D has a very strong mathematical basis in predicate logic. You might say that the methods it uses have been under test for longer than computers have existed, so I think this is a tool we can trust.; Posted by: jorwell Posted on: 08/25/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use