Quote:
Originally Posted by
rbatte1
banunkin, Do you mean the "If those foreigners don't understand, just shout louder" brigade?
Not exactly. What i mean is the "i want everything in a foreign land to be exactly like i am used to at home" - which begs the question "why go to a foreign land in first place". I live in Frankfurt/Main right now. At the corner there is a nice little italian restaurant i like to visit for dinner. The restaurant is run by a married couple: she - doing the service - is speaking some odd mixture of german and italian, which passes for "cute". He (the cook) is speaking no german at all. They have 3 daughters, all married to italians, they talk only in italian, they never spend their vacation anywhere else than Italy (precisely, they say "at home"), albeit already living for 25 years in Germany, etc..
I couldn't spend my life that way. I know not a single word of japanese, but if i would be forced to live in Japan, I'd try to speak japanese as fluently as possible. I would not dine exclusively in austrian restaurants and i would clothe myself like the japanese people do. If this includes kimonoes or something else foreign to me, then so be it.
It is the same with programming languages. For instance: of course it is possible to use C-like pointer structures in PASCAL - it is just cumbersome, inefficient and PASCAL is not really made to use memory like that. Of course it is possible to program around FORTRAN math functions (in fact i had to maintain such a program once - i still have nightmares from that) in a bid to outperform them: it is highly improbably, though, to succeed and there is a good chance to just produce tons of unreadable, unmaintainable and outright shitty code.
There are some tenets every programmer, regardless of his toolset should observe: simplicity, encapsulation, proper indentation, well-defined interfaces, .... But then, there are some innate strategies, structures, ways to deal with certain problems special to every programming language. One can argue if object orientation is a good programming paradigma or not - but if you think it is not, then you should not use Oberon or Modula 2 but stick to PASCAL, even if it is not well suited for large software projects. But I'd prefer to debug a well-written PASCAL-program over a poorly-written Oberon-program.
bakunin