[295] in Zephyr_Comments
Zwgc description language
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Harrington)
Tue Jun 6 13:09:50 1989
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 89 13:08:32 EDT
From: Joe Harrington <jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: zephyr-comments@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, watchmakers@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
no one but course 6 people knows lisp. so you'd have to teach most
users a new language. hard.
most people also do not know C, though more know it than lisp, and
it's the language unix and athena are built on.
more people know some kind of shell-like language -- csh, sh, basic,
etc., and it seems more natural to beginners.
athena must be designed for the users. if the users will need/want to
do zwgc programming, the language provided ought to be something
they're already familiar with, or must be simple to learn.
to get something they're familiar with means you need to provide a
variety of interfaces: a lisp-like one, a C-like one, an old-zwgc-like
one, etc. the potential for confusion and the difficulty in making
future changes is obvious.
this still doesn't catch the majority of users who don't know ANY
language. the only solution which is good for them is a language
which is simple to learn, and no full-blown language that athena
supports qualifies.
i also wonder why going to a full-blown language is necessary --
there's a lot of unnecessary hair in most languages, for something
which basically only wants some ordinary logical operations involving
a few data types and a few primitive functions. what was wrong with
the concept of the old language? there are a few features I'd like it
to have, but not that many. (better variables, boolean operations,
and a secure "put the message in a file" command). it is very simple,
and users seem to be able to handle it just fine. what can it not do
that some ordinary extensions would not fix?
something else which should be supported as an option is some way of
letting the user write his own message processor, piping the message
and some auxiliary info back and forth between the receiver and the
output programs.
--jh--
