Re: Should gnuplot become a programming environment?

[Philipp K. J. <ja...@ie...>]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2014 23:29:45 -0700
sfeam <sf...@us...> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 29 October 2014 04:52:54 PM Philipp K. Janert wrote:
> > 
> > (This started as a discussion on heredocs, but
> > is really about a bigger-picture-issue. So, I'll
> > try to restart this thread again.)
> > 

[snip]

> > 
> > One more thing: scientists are not language
> > designers, and therefore tend to underestimate
> > the difficulties in designing a consistent
> > and maintainable language.
> 
> I'm not sure history bears you out there.

I am sorry - I really, REALLY, REALLY do not want 
to start a language war!

> 
> Some of the most successful computer languages,
> starting with Fortran, were designed by scientists.

My horror stories are scientific languages that 
were never designed, but that grew. The two 
biggest contenders are matlab and R. 

From a language point of view, everything about
them is wrong.