D
dbeavon
Guest
I would agree that the language has remained quite primitive. Sometimes I think it may be deliberate. If the ABL language actually did have all the things you mentioned then at some point Progress would be force to stop touting how "simple" it is (they used to say that even a line-of-business power-user could build an app with it). Additionally the language would eventually have to face off with the likes of Java or C# one day. That might not go so well. I think ABL is intended to be complementary to .Net or Java rather than go head-to-head with them. I don't want to hijack your thread, but one thing I've always hoped Progress would do (even more than extending OOABL) is to cross-compile to another language or, better yet, compile itself into the bytecode of another runtime. It would be extremely helpful if we could compile to MSIL or Java bytecode, or even web assembly. That would allow us to more easily integrate with the software from the other larger ecosystems. All of them have *open* standards and the related communities are *huge* - and they are certainly big enough to where ABL could play along. The advantage would be the *size* of the community (multiple languages, numerous libraries, ORM's to choose from, etc). To me the ABL language is analogous to an ORM - it is good for interacting with relational databases but is quite limited in many other areas. If it were part of another larger ecosystem, then the limitations of ABL would not *feel* quite as limiting - because we would be able to easily hop outside the walls of the ABL language and incorporate solutions from the rest of the community. Again, I totally agree that the OOABL language needs a lot of TLC. But Progress is "only" a two billion dollar company and they have lots of competing priorities. And within this two billion dollar company, there is also a diversity of products. Progress doesn't invest exclusively in OpenEdge.
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