A Little Revolution Does A Developer Good
May 20th, 2008
Round here we develop all of our desktop applications using Revolution. I recently attended the RunRevLive 08 conference in Las Vegas where one of the speakers was Robert Cailliau, the co-developer of the web. Robert spoke on “Programming systems and the birth of the Web”. Following a very interesting presentation on how the web came about he discussed some characteristics he thought a good programming language should have:
- You should not need the reference manual lying open next to you.
- A good assignment operator.
- The less “swear” characters the better. These are characters from the top of the keyboard and are like the top shelf at a newsstand – dirty.
- You should not need lots of comments.
His point was that you spend most of your time reading your code, not writing it. Therefore the language should be easy to read and understand. Since Revolution uses an english-like syntax it fulfills all of Robert’s criteria.
