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Re: Another mutated variant of the 'PowerPoint makes youdumb'

• To: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Subject: Re: Another mutated variant of the 'PowerPoint makes youdumb' story
• From: Alaric B Snell <alaric@a...>
• Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:35:46 +0000
• Cc: Michael Champion <mc@x...>,"'xml-dev@l...'" <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <6.0.0.22.2.20031218111610.03b7fd50@n...>
• References: <5347A829-30F7-11D8-8F9B-000A95CCC59E@x...> <6.0.0.22.2.20031218111610.03b7fd50@n...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030704 Debian/1.4-1

Jonathan Robie wrote:

> Reminds me of the people who thought that managers would be able to read 
> COBOL programs even if they couldn't program, since COBOL has such 
> natural English-based syntax.

Apparently SQL was designed with similar goals, too, which is why I now 
have to suffer when the smart run-time query optimiser Gets It Wrong and 
I have to write contorted SQL to trick the optimiser into scanning the 
tables in the right order when doing a join :-)

Attempts to make programming possible for the non-programmers always 
seem to end in failure. The lesson to learn is that the hard part of 
programming isn't the syntax - it's the mindset.

Things like ColdFusion attempted to make server-side scripting easy for 
people coming from an HTML background by making all the commands look 
like elements and attributes, but it seemed to just spawn a load of 
badly implemented Web sites. It provided an easier learning curve on the 
*syntax* than PHP or ASP or whatever, but you still needed to understand 
HTTP, SQL, Web security, string processing, ...

> 
> Jonathan
> 

ABS

• References:
  • Another mutated variant of the 'PowerPoint makes you dumb' story
    • From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: Another mutated variant of the 'PowerPoint makes you dumb' story
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>

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