Is the Prime suitable, for me

[Mike Gale]

In a better world I'd have different languages available to me. All of them able to access work done in the others (provided they can use it).

In that situation myPrime would be codable in original RPN, in RPL etc. and use remote procedure calls to my Network or the InterWebs where I choose.

For my own work I can then fluidly move from language to language, should I want that.

Background 1.

I have designed significant chunks of a chemical plant on a 41. The work was based on a technically detailed report, so documentation was excellent, and using the 41 was just so quick, and so solid. It was literally sit down, code for a few hours and it's done. (At the time going through the "DP" department would have taken months of bureaucracy and had a risk of utterly useless coding.)

Background 2.

I remember years ago coding for web pages. The browser designers were still adventurous, effective and creative. I coded test web pages with a mix of VBScript, JScript and Perl. All the code inter-operated, each language could do what it was good at. (I even had people trying to persuade me to bolt in other languages. I never did that, considered it beyond my reach, but in truth it wasn't hard.) (Now of course we've gone firmly into reverse on that axis. JavaScript may be very good at heart (it is the Self language hurriedly recast into a curly braces syntax, after all) but it's become a monoculture and only one language stifles thought and reduces the human experience.)

Background 3.

I've used the .NET execution environment. In there I can mix languages, say VB.NET, C#, JScript.NET, F# and maybe some Python. That is a powerful freedom to have and, if you've ever used it, illustrates the joy of language freedom. If I could add RPN, RPL... to that...

The real world, unfortunately, is not that multi-lingual. I might love the thought of features in Prime, but the designers of Prime have chosen to force me to choose. (I might love Pascal (I do), but I really want an RPN style capability (in programming) so...) One thing that really disturbs me about this is that young minds are being systematically stifled by such decisions. That's a mental poison that will impact the future of mankind.