Re: What databases have taught me

Robert Martin wrote:
> C++ is a fine language for many kinds of applications.

For systems that need tight O/S integration and high performance, it's better than C. I'd say "many" is overstating it, and I think the number is dwindling.

> I think it's
> getting a little long in the tooth nowadays; but it will be around for
> a long time to come.

Agreed, but so are COBOL and Fortran.

> Though I used to be a C++ programmer and
> evangelist, my interests lie elsewhere these days. I now do most of my
> programming in Java, and am about to start investing heavily into Ruby.

Lisp has all the niceties Ruby does, and many more. I think Ruby shows O-O aficionados just a glimpse of the power that other languages already have (closures - sort of, DSLs, other hooks into the runtime / metaobject system).

On the other side of the coin, I'm learning Ocaml and Haskell. I think the attention on the dynamically-typed languages is due primarily to the problems with the major statically-typed languages; that doesn't mean there aren't better statically-typed languages with good type inferencing, and I think many strides are still being made on the strongly-typed front.

• Eric