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000013_icon-group-sender _Fri Apr 23 15:00:30 1993.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Sun, 25 Apr 1993 18:21:48 MST
Date: 23 Apr 93 15:00:30 GMT
From: howland.reston.ans.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!msuinfo!uchinews!ellis!goer@gatech.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Organization: University of Chicago
Subject: Re: runtime debugger
Message-Id: <1993Apr23.150030.11124@midway.uchicago.edu>
References: <199304220511.AA28454@chuckwalla.cs.arizona.edu>
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
"Clint Jeffery" <cjeffery@cs.arizona.edu> writes:
>
>So I think Icon is not more popular because it does not cater to
>introductory computer science education, because its implementations are
>not very fast, because it does not provide much access to system-specific
>features, and also because there are plenty of other languages out there
>that are already popular.
Implementation speed is certainly no worse than it is for Prolog, uncom-
piled LISP, PERL, AWK, etc., and these languages are nothing to scoff at.
System-specific features are not particularly prominent in three of these
four languages. And Icon is more widely implemented than two, equally
widely implemented as one, and second only to LISP in this respect. But
of course if we restrict LISP to Common Lisp, then perhaps it's even on
a par there as well.
This is not said in disagreement with you Clint. In fact, I agree with
your main reason why Icon is used by a small, devoted community: Icon
does not cater to the introductory CS course regimen. Icon has, as its
natural constituency, people interested in AI, NLP, text, translation,
and general nonnumeric computing. Intro CS courses are not taught, in
general, by this sort of person. Humanities people, when they decide to
take the few non-CS programming courses that are available, generally must
suffer with Pascal or something high-level special-purpose language that
only works on this or that machine.
When the millennium arrives, universities will recognize that all students
doing any serious research should know something about programming. They
will also recognize that humanities students need a separate track. Fin-
ally, they will recognize that, in order to teach humanities programming,
one needs a true humanist - not a "willing" CS instructor. I have been
frustrated all of my computing life by the lack of good instruction avail-
able for humanists. We generally have to be self-educated.
The Icon Project members are, interestingly, more capable in nonnumeric
matters than most CS researchers I've met. Which leads me to wonder: Why
pretend any longer that Icon is standard CS fare? Its major user-accessible
advances have largely been in interface design and in solving problems that
require heuristic methods, rather than algorithmic ones. Icon really isn't
(from a user's standpoint) a good, standard CS language, except for those
interested in language design and theory.
Icon is a *great* language, and I hope it won't go away. Makes life easier
for a large range of problems. It's just that this range of problems lies
more in my area, I think, than it does in the CS fold. Clint: Why not take
advantage of Icon's uniqueness, and start showing up a Humanities computing
conferences, interface design conventions, etc. :-) 1/2 ?
--
-Richard L. Goerwitz goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
goer@midway.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer