Re: A database theory resource - ideas

On Mar 18, 1:53 am, "Marshall" <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:

(Another one down the Google Groups memory hole. sigh...)

> Oh, pooh. The problem isn't Kernighan, nor Ritchie, nor C itself.
> There are perfectly good uses for a low-level programming
> language. The problem is the legions who came afterwards
> who didn't recognize C for what it was, and instead turned
> it in to the One True Way.
>

No, it's worse than that. Aside from C being a macro assembler pretending to be a high level language, the exposition of it in book form, "The C Programming Language", is a woeful attempt at describing it. It has no redeeming features - it isn't short (compared to the Algol-60 Report or the Pascal Report, which also do a better job describing the respective languages), and it is insufficiently formal (apocryphally, you could write 4 compilers which all agreed with some interpretation of the text but which all produced different results with the same source code - since they all "agreed" with the text, they were all "correct"). Both of these are fatal flaws in any kind of specification, and fatal to the max in a language spec. Sadly, others have been influenced by both the language and the style of exposition.

> I am inclined to think Knuth overrated. But that's just me; I think
> Stanley Kubrick is overrated too.
>

A number of Kubrick films are best viewed with the sound down and watched as moving paintings.

> Cardelli? Hello? How have we come this far and no one has
> mentioned Cardelli?
>

Well, Luca Cardelli deserves a gong for his "Fundamental Theory of Management", I suppose ;)

What about Robin Milner (and the rest of the LCF team) ? Or Dana Scott & Christopher Strachey (or even Joe Stoy) ? Or Peter Landin ? Or Robert Kowalski, or the joy of Clocksin & Mellish ;)

> Peyton-Jones is uber-interesting. Wadler mostly just confuses me
> these days; is he playing an elaborate joke on us or what?
>

I did ponder that in Wadler's days at Avaya when he was doing the XML thang ... Received on Mon Mar 19 2007 - 11:17:27 CET