Old open-source hacker Raymond talks about computer language

Eric Raymond, the leader of the open source code Promotion Association, has been working hard in the business world

Programmer Build a bridge with more and more Linux advocates. In addition, his idea coincides with the content of his book "new hacker Dictionary", which was published in 1991 and focuses on the Internet and hacker culture. It remains a legend.

Eric Raymond recently launched his new book "Unix Programming The book involves the essence of programming culture and some thinking processes using UNIX. During the recent promotions for his new book, Eric Raymond spoke in an interview with internetnews.com about many scientific topics.

　　Q: during the past ten years, programmers have been trained on Windows as a preliminary training program. Is this the case? Or are all students trained on Linux?

Both cases exist. This is the world of personal computers. In today's children's view, the so-called minicomputers and large computers do not seem to have existed.

　　Q: Do you think there are any more important development trends?

The emergence of a 64-bit computer was beyond my expectation a few years ago. The main reason was that the demand for address space exceeded my original estimation.

　　Q: The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is currently very popular among program developers. Is there any misunderstanding about the role of XML?

As far as I know, some people think that XML has a magical feature that can solve the problem of data structure and data organization, which is a serious misunderstanding. In fact, XML cannot have such a function, because it is only a basic syntax and can only solve some low-level problems, such as how to connect records and write them at a high level. Design . A series of problems, such as the document type, database scheme, and data transmission between different schemes and file types, cannot be solved by XML itself. In the real world, there are multiple sources. This will always happen in the future.

　　Q: Can we talk about the security performance of XML?

I know the person in charge of the XML digital authentication organization. He will soon release a standard, and we will also have a standard system to ensure the security of XML data. Therefore, I think there will be great progress in data security in the near future.

　　Q: What do you think about the Simple Object Access Protocol Based on XML?

In fact, I think the role of soap is not as good as it is advertised, just like the relationship between C ++ and C. You also know that C ++ is more powerful, but it also makes the program more complex, so it is not very beneficial. I think soap also has the same relationship with XML-RPC (remote program call.

There is usually a phenomenon called Second System Syndrome, that is to say, the system you designed for the first time can complete 80% of the work tasks, this system is quite simple, but in order to complete another 20% of the work, you will often re-design the second system, the system itself will be so complex that it will often crash.

Soap is a bad second system. I think soap is not reliable because it is too complicated. People can have only two options, either deciding that xml rpc is enough or creating a third system.

　　Q: What do you think about Java?

I have not studied Java in depth. Most programmers use Java, but I use python. These two languages have no major functional differences, so I didn't give up Python and chose Java.

Q: What do you think about scripting, which inevitably involves python, Perl, and PHP?

I think these next-generation scripting languages are very easy to use and are powerful tools. They cannot solve all the problems, but they provide you with a quick search Solution . This is commendable because the conflicts with traditional programming languages are quite serious and you cannot try all the solutions either.

　　Q: In the past, the scripting language was always behind the classification language, because the scripting language occupies a large amount of computing resources. Resources Is this still the case?

The entire development history of development tools, that is, the history that machine time is cheaper than programmer time. In other words, programmer time becomes more and more expensive, therefore, it makes sense to automate low-end resource storage and management. Programmers can concentrate on solving some high-end tasks, which can be said to be the benefit of the scripting language.

　　Q: Is the appearance of cheap computing resources negatively affecting the software industry?

I don't think the appearance of cheap computing resources is right Software Engineering Negative impact. If there is an impact, it just makes it concise Software Design More necessary, because writing a large amount of code is quite easy.

Looking at the functional gaps in various languages from a 30 thousand-foot perspective, you will find that python and Perl are quite close. Almost all of the functions you implement in one language can be implemented in another language. The only difference is that it is relatively difficult to compile fuzzy code using python. After six months of practice, I found that the Python language is easier to read than Perl. I am also convinced that maintaining long-term stability is the most convincing feature in any language for large-scale projects we are working on today.

　　Q: Right?

Of course, but I am not saying that this is a long-term development trend. I think people will find that there will be more and more hidden costs.

　　Q: Is the above based on a cultural difference, or do you want programmers to communicate with each other online?

Both.