Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: SDK or not
Author: Jon Fernquest Posted: 8/5/1999; 9:54:31 PM Topic: Yusuf Mehdi on Instant Messaging Msg #: 9201 (In response to 9197) Prev/Next: 9200 / 9203
>But the history of computing has been an ever-increasing >ability of users to do "interesting things" without programming.I don't think most mainstream programmers, realize how many different types of non-programmer programmers there are out there.
1. Engineers and scientists doing numerical analysis with Mathematic (Perl and Python also).
2. Statistics of all flavors (medical to economic to marketing) using statistical packages such as SAS, SPSS, S+, and Gauss.
3. Linguists concordancing or parsing texts with Awk, Perl, or the Xerox Finite State Tools.
4. Anyone for whom programming is merely a tool to analyse data or format data and who uses programming languages like Perl, Awk, Python, Tcl/Tk, or Tcl/Tk extensions like Graphscript to accomplish these tasks.
Even C++ experts like Bruce Eckel turn to languages like Python to get things done quickly: http://www.mindview.net/PythonProjectWorkshop/index.html
Python was designed with these people in mind: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/everybody.html
I think little languages like Graphscript, a Tcl/Tk extension for graph manipulation and algorithms are the future, or one very important future for programming: http://www.uni-passau.de/Graphlet/
Jon Fernquest bayinnaung@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/3472/index.html
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