Do we need to build "our small church" ? (was : Web programming progress report)

[Richard Gaskin]

Pierre Sahores wrote:

>>> Perl's great -- until you get a Web host that lets you run MC. :)
>> Perl's never great! <g,r,d> Go Python! Go Transcript!
> -- snip --
> 
> Please friends ! We all, the MC/Rev developers, don't need to build "our
> small church", in thinking that there is no ways to develop great softs
> outside of the Metatalk/Transcript world...
>
> The best we can do is to let evry one of us, witch knows other kind of
> languages, compare what can be done in differents ways along or beside
> our core MC/Rev development tools (aka php, applescript, the unixes
> shells, lisp, smalltalk, python, perl or rebol, etc...) to let us become
> aware about the concepts and the methods we can learn from "others
> computer worlds", even if, most of the time, it will be ways to catch
> the bests ideas and recode them in Metatalk/Transcript.

Amen, brother.  "Right tool for the right job."  Testify!
  
[Excellent examples of the virtues of SQL deleted for brevity...]

> It was just to say... MC/Rev are probably lots more than our first
> choice if, we can understand how to melt the needed outworld's
> technologies in our softs, each time the final products are going to be
> better in this way.

There is one area where xTalk shines more brightly than nearly any other
language:  chunk expressions.

While Regex has its place and is increasingly available to other languages,
Transcript's chunk expressions provide a valuable compliment for simple,
efficient, maintainable text processing.

My favorite example -  How many lines would it take to say this in
JavaScript?:

  put char 4 of word 3 of item 2 of line 8 of fld 1 into msg

In Transcript that takes under 60 characters; in JavaScript I'd estimate it
might take as many lines.  And fans of that
not-designed-for-runtime-interpretation language say xTalk is "verbose"?

;)

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
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