[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/29/2022 12:11 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 1/28/2022 2:14 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> BLISS, and especially Macro-32, belong in the past for any brand new
>> programs (as opposed to maintaining existing ones)
> 
> Bliss was developed for writing system level code.  Why has it all of a 
> sudden become unsuitable?  I will admit that it isn't so well known.

Bliss does today what it did 40 years ago.

But the world has changed in those 40 years.

The code bases has increased in size. An OS is probably 10
times as many lines of code as it would have been 40 years ago.
Unless higher productivity languages and tools are introduced
that means more than 10 times as expensive.

Hardware for money has increase dramatically. Probably like
a factor 10000. An extra instruction here and there and a few
extra bytes here and there cost very little.

New languages and tools has shown up. C is far from new. But C++
and Rust are newer than Bliss.

So even if Bliss works the same today as it did 40 years ago,
then it can still have been the right choice 40 years ago and the
wrong choice today.

Arne