Re: [tlug] ruby and python in Japan

[Curt Sampson <cjs@??>]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2007, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> > A reasonably nice language, and a perfect example of how lack of library
> > standardization can kill a decent language.
>
> And the common point between Common Lisp and Javascript is that they are both 
> standards: Common lisp is ANSI and Javascript is ECMA (if I remember well...)

To my mind, saying that they both have standards has similar information
content to saying that they're both programming languages. If you look
at the standards and how the languages are used, the differences are
night and say.

The Common Lisp standard, while long, is quite readable and provides
a fairly easily understood definition of the language, with plenty of
examples. The ECMAScript standard, on the other hand, appears almost as
if it was designed to be very difficult to understand; I've never seen a
computer language standard as bad as that one.

Common Lisp standardized a large library, and it's what everybody uses.
ECMAScript standardizes little or nothing in the way of a library,
and even libraries that have independent standards, such as DOM, are
quite inconsistently implemented, to the point where you are constantly
writing platform-specific code when using the library.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@??>        +81 90 7737 2974