On 05/22/2017 10:53 PM, Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Most of my dad's career was writing COBOL programs. I'll never have that stability in today's "language of the month" club: Perl, Python, Go, Ruby on Rails, Java and all its variants and environments, ADA (before it was a fruit), FORTRAN/RATFOR/WATFIV, ...
[sorry, got busy here] The "language of the month" problem existed back in the "good old days" too, but they didn't have the Internet to spread the ideas, and there were far fewer kids with no experience but huge egos running around trying to reinvent/redesign everything because "those old farts couldn't possibly have known what they were doing back then". (systemd also comes to mind) I'm shocked Python actually caught on, with some of its awful design decisions (whitespace as a syntactic element, really?), but it pretty much won the war of the trendy scripting languages. That's probably a safe long-term bet now due to the inertia it has established. Thank heaven Perl has finally died. God that was awful. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA