[Info-vax] DCL's flaws (both scripting and UI)

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-01-30, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> wrote:
> On 2015-01-20, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>> On 2015-01-19 22:53:11 +0000, John Reagan said:
>>
>>> I'd rather not mung up DCL with aggregate returns (don't call them 
>>> objects please) but rather say you should use Perl or Python for such 
>>> larger tasks.
>>
>> Which gets back to looking at how to provide an alternative or a more 
>> modern scripting language than what DCL provides.
>>
>> So get Perl, Python or Lua into the base distro, and with a decent set 
>> of libraries, and ? like what is offered for DCL ? allow an easy path 
>> for direct invocation.
>
> I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but Javascript might be
> a good idea.  Its use has expanded well beyond putting fancy bits into
> web pages and can now be used for things like MongoDB.  I'm thinking
> of how to make VMS an attractive proposition for a larger audience
> here.
>

I've been doing some work writing Firefox addons recently so my knowledge
of Javascript is now far greater than it was a few months ago. My opinion
of it is also lower than it was a few months ago.

Javascript (and/or the Firefox classes) allows stupid little errors through
without reporting errors which would be caught outright in other languages.

For example, I moved some code from a routine into a class and I missed
a reference to an array index so it was written as something like
"array_name[db_idx].variable" instead of "array_name[this.db_idx].variable"
and Javascript executed the code silently without reporting a single
error or warning.

I also remember been surprised at one or two other things Javascript
did but I don't remember the details.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world