Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!glad From: Richard Thomas Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta Subject: Re: The plasticity of the BETA language Date: 21 Dec 1995 04:08:53 GMT Organization: DAIMI, Computer Science Dept. at Aarhus University Lines: 46 Approved: mailtonews@daimi.aau.dk Distribution: world Message-ID: <4bamkl$jtp@krone.daimi.aau.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: daimi.daimi.aau.dk I must confess that my background in eco-systems is not strong enough to really follow the model you tried to explain My first question is: in considering Smalltalk and CLOS did the meta-class facility come close to offering what you wanted? If not can you explain what problems it had, that patterns in Beta overcame? > What shocks is that someone doing a Ph.D. degree in Urbana Champaign > Illinois for example and says that C plus plus is just a perfect > language and one can deal with it as the Queen language in > computer science. Could you provide a reference for this statement? Knowing the quality of people at Urbana-Champaign, I can't see how anyone in the computing programme would get away with making such a statement. Are they really doing a PhD in computing, or in some other discipline and just happen to be using C++ as a programming language? No serious scientist is ever going to say that one language is perfect. Not even Beta. Each language has its own strengths. That is why the inventor created the language, for whatever purposes they had in mind. One language will never be perfect, and suited to all problems. > I am not a computer scientist and for me it is evident the superiority > of the true object oriented languages over C plus plus. The superiority > of BETA embedded in the Mjolner Beta system is just astonishing. And > yet I have to swallow opinions that are Ph.D. theses as prevailing. It's hard to say that C++ is not a true OO language. It offers every facility that any serious criteria for OO languages has ever required. Beta may be superior for the application you are developing, but Beta could never be superior for every application. Don't let the suitability of Beta to your problem make you as biased as you claim the other narrow-minded people are. Not every problem is like your own (actually judging from your description of your problem there would be very few problems that are similar to your own, compared against all the other types of problems that are around). Richard Thomas School of Computing Science Queensland University of Technology