[Info-vax] IBM Layoffs (quite a bit off topic)

[johnson.eric at gmail.com]

On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 6:17:56 PM UTC-5, David Froble wrote:

> Just teach VAX Basic, what else could ever be needed?  :-)

I know you probably mean this tongue in cheek, but I'll answer anyway.

Perhaps DEC Basic has constructs I wasn't aware of, but I suspect it
would be a bit tough to cover programmatic idioms that center around
things such as closures, lambdas, call with current continuation, generic
programming, functional programming, object oriented programming, 
dynamic typing, meta programming, and of course garbage collection.

To be fair, no language covers all of those topics completely. Many things
are entwined, and there are of course tradeoffs between what a language
chooses to emphasize and what it chooses to hide. But I'm just not sure
I see a language like DEC Basic offering a unique voice on those topics.

EJ