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000136_icon-group-sender_Thu Nov 21 12:36:09 2002.msg
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Received: (from root@localhost)
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id gALJa5A07318
for icon-group-addresses; Thu, 21 Nov 2002 12:36:06 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200211211936.gALJa5A07318@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Subject: Re: I know why Icon isn't popular.
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
From: "Joel I Bolonick" <Joel.Bolonick@celeradiagnostics.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 09:31:02 -0800
X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on USFRMMTA01/FRM/PEC(Release 5.0.8 |June 18, 2001) at
11/21/2002 12:33:38 PM
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
Although I hate to get involved in these "my language is better than yours"
debates, I can't resist putting my 2 cents into this discussion.
Icon is a fine language in the UNIX environment which just hasn't been
picked up by commercial developers or the open-source community to
popularize it and to add the enhancements which many programmers like.
It has the misfortune of overlapping in application and functionality with
Perl, which, for better or worse, has become the default high-level
text-oriented application language, although Perl's inelegance is enough to
horrify many professional programmers like myself. Also, since Icon is not
object-oriented it falls short of the current fads in computer languages.
Because of these issues, it just hasn't been seen as a sexy language to
promote.
I've written several very large applications in Icon and can say that,
although lacking in some features which would make it more
self-documenting, it's a great language for string-oriented problems which
require complex data structures. My only real complaints are: (1) it
would be nice if there were a more explicit way of defining data structures
which would make the structure more obvious and (2) it would have been nice
if all the fancy string-parsing stuff from SNOBOL had been incorporated by
Griswold as part of the language. The latter feature would make the use of
regular expressions completely unncessary except for those committed to
their terse syntax.