Dirty Glasses

Incidentally I've seen that James Robertson linked an
entry about Thoughts on Domain Languages.
Here is his article: Closer is Better.

I found the comments really interesting:
[Anthony Nassar]: I've just seen the specification for C# 3.0. Good heavens They've added what look like some of the features of dynamically typed languages, but making C# all things to all people is going to open the door again to the coding style I remember from VB.NET.

[james bridger], on C# and LinQ: For some reason this is getting lots of love at the moment - I've only seen one negative comment on it. Maybe I'm just missing something...

[Tom Sattler]: The most annoying thing about this original post is referring to Smalltalk in the past tense. Hey, world, it's STILL HERE, dammit.

First, I must apologies to Tom Sattler: I know you are "here", so is ruby, eiffel, haskell, lisp.
But you are not here in the minds of the people who decide which technology will use on their projects. And we know why: for java/c#/c++ you will always get developers, and there is a lot of people who use it. This doesn't make it better, but it makes it safer as an investment.

And this whole push up movement gets with the numbers
(developers, developers, developers) inertia:
the bigger is the mass of the developers, the "easier" will be for the people to read these programs, more components are made available on that platform, more speeches are on this thema, more jobs will be, more people will like to learn technology X to get a job, and so on.

So in the end it gets to that: how fast are you getting the critical mass, how fast can you sell your stuff to a "flock" of developers, until they follow you until the end.

I think there are few programmers who can appreciate the elegance of Smalltalk. (Personally I like ruby better: I've got intoxicated with the C/C++ syntax for more than 10 years, so it is very hard for me to quit: I just love the dots and the parantheses :D)

Now about C# and LINQ: Yes, "Good Heavens". I already posted on that, and I don't understand it either. They (Microsoft) already have a product which does all that LINQ, and it is called FoxPro. Where is that now? If it is so good, why isn't it ported to .Net? Why don't they push the VisualFoxPro, like they did with C#?

Why can't we take a step back, and realize that "Less is More".
With less language baggage, your programs will be easier to write and maintain. With less, but better programmers, you can advance faster than with a herd of medium developers.

[Troy Brummel] said: I can read Smalltalk, and write in it, but there's nothing in it that I can pick up and show to a domain expert, have her read it, and say "yeah, that's what I meant." And, I don't think it comes any closer to doing that than any other language I've used.

I see the problem from another angle: our job is to model a domain, and every "using", "lock",
"var", "select" is a baggage which we carry and makes our job more difficult. This stuff I have to read, understand, understand what the others meant by using it. All this "baggage" stays in your way, it "hides" the domain from you. That's why we train ourselves, to be able to carry (and don't feel) this burden. (I see that Troy is a very strong developer.)

Metaphor: My glasses are dirty, and I see the "domain" with spots. :D

ps. Another post about curving the learning curve.