Much of the IBM documentation refers to Vue as being Òawk-likeÓ. I think the comparison is good in that 1) they are written to respond to situations as they are encountered, 2) they have similar structure. The comparisons soon fall apart after that as the problem domain and language elements are entirely different.

An Òevent drivenÓ language is where you define what to do when an event happens. This differs from an imperative language (a loose classification) in that an event driven program does not (necessarily) have a clear flow. Imperative languages move to a specific end possibly assisted by user input. The flow of a Vue ÒapplicationÓ is dependent on events that happen (typically) outside the ProbeVue environment and (in most cases) do not have a predictable sequence of events.

The key skills that make this ÒlanguageÓ / environment approachable are:

• Knowledge of the C language

• Knowledge of system calls

• Knowledge of shell scripting and some high level language experience such as Perl, Java, or C++.