Invisible wrote:
>> First, I expect more production code has been written
>> in BASIC than Haskell.
> 
> By which measurement? Number of applications? Number of lines of code? 

Either of those.

> What counts as "production"? 

Put up for sale and purchased? Business-critical computations run with it?

> Which dialects of BASIC count? (For 
> example, where I work, we have a 4,000 line QBasic monstrosity which we 
> use for scientific work, for reasons beyond my comprehension. Does 
> QBasic count? Or is that too modern?)

See? That's exactly what I mean. How many businesses ran 8-bit software on 
apples or radio shack or whatever?  How many mainframe programs were written 
in Haskell?

If you're going to start counting the variants of BASIC that don't suck by 
your metric (e.g., VB.NET, VB6, etc) then I can guarantee there's orders of 
magnitude more production code in BASIC than Haskell. I can guarantee 
there's more demo code in BASIC than Haskell.

> I'm doubtful that BASIC has more production code than Haskell in terms 
> of number of lines of code. OTOH, since I have no scientific data on 
> which to decide either way, it's kind of an empty point.

You're too young, grasshopper. Back when BASIC was the language of choice 
for personal computers, there was a crapload of production code in BASIC.

> Excel macros, makefiles and shell scripts are all strictly more powerful 
> than BASIC in at least one objective way: they all support recursion. 
> BASIC does not.

Makefiles don't support recursion except by invoking themselves externally. 
It's only relatively recently that shell script have supported recursion in 
the language itself.

Plus, when you're trying to solve a problem like building software, 
recursion is a point *against* your solution.

>>>>> Truth is, if you compare almost any pair of complex objects, usually
>>>>> one is so clearly superior to the other that there's nothing to argue
>>>>> about,
>>>>
>>>> Except, you know, Holy stuff.
>>>
>>> That would be the other half of that sentence, yes.
>>
>> I would disagree on that.
> 
> I said "when you compare two things, usually one is obviously superior 
> to the other, *or* both have their uses". Which seems pretty 
> uncontroversial to me.

I don't think you'll find too many people that agree that both Catholicism 
*and* Islam "both have their uses".  If you believe in either one, the other 
is an evil plot from Satan to damn you to hell. If you don't believe in 
either one, neither has a use. (Exaggerating, of course.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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