Windows script files and pedagogy
While toiling away at work on a Saturday afternoon, trying to figure out how to communicate between real and virtual machines, I encountered this article by geekstar Eric Lippert on the Windows Script Files.
As far as I can tell, Windows Script Files are a nifty bastardization of the declarative power of XML and the dynamic power of scripting languages. They enable Windows system administrators and glue coders access to a lot of features that already exist in HTML scripting and ASP, but have been missing from the system administration world, such as include files and access to type libraries.
This is obviously useful if one wants to manage a truly complicated sets of glue code in a way that eliminates cut-n'-paste anarchy. But one statement that Lippert made as he talked about the inevitable comparison of VBScript over Windows Scripting Files seemed unusually relevant to the current Python vs. Java discussion:
In his article, Lippert was explicitly referring to the fact that people can smugly prove that writing "“Hello, world" in VBScript requires far less code than using a Windows Script File, but the latter is not designed for little snippets of code. It is retarded to compare the two using that kind of example. The latter was designed for complex situations. Of course it takes more lines of code to produce the same function, but Windows Script Files are required to in order to deal with exponential levels of complexity they allow a programmer to manage.
The sad thing is, I see the same kinds of comparison over and over with Python vs. Java. Examples that are used to hype the newer and less formal object-oriented languages such as Python over traditional languages such as Java by necessity will favor the sleeker less formal languages because the examples are too trivial. And that is equally retarded. Can't we all just get along?
As far as I can tell, Windows Script Files are a nifty bastardization of the declarative power of XML and the dynamic power of scripting languages. They enable Windows system administrators and glue coders access to a lot of features that already exist in HTML scripting and ASP, but have been missing from the system administration world, such as include files and access to type libraries.
This is obviously useful if one wants to manage a truly complicated sets of glue code in a way that eliminates cut-n'-paste anarchy. But one statement that Lippert made as he talked about the inevitable comparison of VBScript over Windows Scripting Files seemed unusually relevant to the current Python vs. Java discussion:
Pedagogic code must be short and easily understood, but code is designed to manage complexity.
In his article, Lippert was explicitly referring to the fact that people can smugly prove that writing "“Hello, world" in VBScript requires far less code than using a Windows Script File, but the latter is not designed for little snippets of code. It is retarded to compare the two using that kind of example. The latter was designed for complex situations. Of course it takes more lines of code to produce the same function, but Windows Script Files are required to in order to deal with exponential levels of complexity they allow a programmer to manage.
The sad thing is, I see the same kinds of comparison over and over with Python vs. Java. Examples that are used to hype the newer and less formal object-oriented languages such as Python over traditional languages such as Java by necessity will favor the sleeker less formal languages because the examples are too trivial. And that is equally retarded. Can't we all just get along?
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