On Mar 11, 2007, at 3:45 AM, wouter van ooijen wrote:

>> Afaik, the rule of thumb is to use the highest level programming
>> language available for the task.
>
> That's what I preach to my students.

There's an exception some place, I think, in specialized "high level
languages" produced by a vendor for a particular processor that lack
any portability.  Things like cypress's PSoC Designer just make me
nervous.  Likewise, Smalltalk has never caught on (maybe it's that
"for the task" part; Smalltalk always struck me as the sort of ultimate
HLL as designed by HLL designers without any particular task in mind,
and thus is never seemed well suited to ANY particular task.)

And I guess that someplace one gets to argue what makes one HLL
"higher" than another.  I've never been much enamored of OOLs like
C++ or Java, and from what I've seen a lot of their advantages stem
more from extensive libraries (ok, "classes") (standard and otherwise)
than "lower level" languages (admittedly, there are features of the
languages that make creating extensive libraries using complex data
structures easier to publish and import than in lower level lanaguages.)

BillW

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