Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Downwardly Scalable Systems Date: 13 Apr 2024 17:17:34 GMT Organization: Stefan Ram Lines: 37 Expires: 1 Feb 2025 11:59:58 GMT Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de gU0eZ/HyhGMV2Xw+IlBZJAdD4BjCYT8zKKccXX71nKytbT Cancel-Lock: sha1:MAL5JFbHzTHqxbFpenHCH3M9ERY= sha256:8Vg9j4pVcR2R7dCHSfIt3GdOrgMg0W8geaky/mg9ylk= X-Copyright: (C) Copyright 2024 Stefan Ram. All rights reserved. Distribution through any means other than regular usenet channels is forbidden. It is forbidden to publish this article in the Web, to change URIs of this article into links, and to transfer the body without this notice, but quotations of parts in other Usenet posts are allowed. X-No-Archive: Yes Archive: no X-No-Archive-Readme: "X-No-Archive" is set, because this prevents some services to mirror the article in the web. But the article may be kept on a Usenet archive server with only NNTP access. X-No-Html: yes Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 2940 Ben Collver wrote or quoted: >programming languages that "scale down". David forgot to tell use what it means for a programming language to "scale down". >Tcl or Python are "simpler" than C, but this is a result of the And again, he uses those quotes! How to define or measure the "simplicity" of a programming language? >difficult to do easy things. To even get started, you have to have >some notions of object oriented programming, you have to split your >code up into lots of little files that must be properly named, and This is a Java program. It usually should be in a file "Main.java". public final class Main { public static void main( final java.lang.String[] args ) { java.lang.System.out.println ( "Hello world!" ); }} . In my Basic course I tell the participants to ignore the first three lines: They are just boilerplate material that is copied to every program. Then we explore what can be done in the last line! As long as your programs are small (even with many more lines than just four), there is no need "to split your code up into lots of little files that must be properly named". And when you split up your Python code into modules, they must be properly named, too. But as the course develops, gradually, my participants learn the meaning and purpose of the first three lines. So, when you start out with vague terms like programming languages that "scale down" and have a certain "simplicity", you can then give vague recommendations!