Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Belated Notice Department: WORA vs WOTE

analysis
Sep 26, 20071 min

Way back in February, in response to an ignorant-sounding comment to a previous posting, I talked about how Write Once languages have never quite done it for me. As is often the case, I tried to restrict myself to my personal experience rather than generalize from that. Today, while searching for another article I'd written, I came across this lengthy response to that little blog post: Keep an Open Eye » Program

Way back in February, in response to an ignorant-sounding comment to a previous posting, I talked about how Write Once languages have never quite done it for me. As is often the case, I tried to restrict myself to my personal experience rather than generalize from that.

Today, while searching for another article I’d written, I came across this lengthy response to that little blog post: Keep an Open Eye » Programming Languages Dynamics.

InfoWorld blogs don’t accept track-backs, because otherwise we bloggers would spend all our time killing track-back spam. So this is the first I’ve seen that essay from March. JBSurveyer raised a bunch of interesting issues, although he also read my posting as being much more generalized than I intended, and tended to put a lot of words in my mouth that I never said.

I’d be happy to reopen the discussion here. Have any languages that claim to be write-once fulfilled their promise? Why or why not?

Try to stick to your personal experience, though. I’m not interested in political pronouncements, or in cheap shots against vendors.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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