[Info-vax] Userland programming languages on VMS.

[Dave Froble]

On 1/29/2022 7:13 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/29/2022 3:21 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 1/29/2022 2:53 PM, John Dallman wrote:
>>> In article <st401o$jaa$1 at dont-email.me>, davef at tsoft-inc.com (Dave Froble)
>>> wrote:
>>>> I have never used Bliss, don't know it at all. So I cannot be the
>>>> judge of its worthiness. But all I seem to  read is "it's old"
>>>> and "nobody knows it". Neither of those actually addresses its
>>>> suitability.
>>>
>>> I've done several assembly languages, BCPL and lots of C. I read the
>>> Bliss manual last year, and posted about it in March 2021.
>>>
>>> It is a language from the era when all programming was assumed to be hard,
>>> requiring detailed design documents, and painstaking specification of
>>> every data structure. This was entirely appropriate for a time when a
>>> mainframe's memory was measured in small numbers of megabytes. However,
>>> the hardware has changed. Packing data into every spare bit is rarely
>>> worthwhile. Using some of the computer's resources to make programming
>>> easier is usually desirable. Bliss is certainly better than assembler,
>>> but it assumes resources are scarce.
>>>
>>> The language seems unforgiving. An extra or missing "." or ";" can change
>>> the meaning of code in important ways. It's quite hard for a compiler to
>>> detect programming errors, more so than with C. Training programmers to
>>> be productive with Bliss looks as if it will take longer than teaching
>>> them appropriate C idioms for low-level programming, and will certainly
>>> produce more complaints.
>>>
>>> I don't know if equally skilled C or Bliss programmers would be more
>>> productive writing OS kernel code. I suspect it would depend on who had
>>> the better set of library routines and other project-specific tools. But
>>> if I had to put a team together for such work, I'd always choose C over
>>> Bliss. Doing the same makes sense for VSI, because they /are not DEC/.
>>> They don't have large pools of programmers to call on. They need to be
>>> able to hire people and have them become productive reasonably quickly.
>>
>> Note that for the task that triggered this thread (DIRECTORY command)
>> which consist of:
>> - retrieving parameter and qualifiers
>> - get info via RMS calls
>> - output result
>> then something even higher level than C would make sense. There is no
>> need for any of the "flexibility" of C.
>
> And it is not just me.
>
> The rust people are rewriting GNU Coreutils (C) in
> rust.
>
> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Rust-Coreutils-Jan-2022
>
> Arne
>

Why?

Seems like another "language of the week".  It ain't broke, but they are fixing 
it anyway.

-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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