From: Greg Graham <greg@...>
Date: 2005-09-20T02:50:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Language recommendations from ruby persons....

I would echo Robbie's enthusiasm for Lisp, and Martin's recommendation
of _Practical Common Lisp_. My Common Lisp and Scheme experience is
limited to small exercises in my spare time, but I would like to do a
big project in it some day. What fascinates me most about Lisp is the
ability to extend the language using macros. Many people criticize the
syntax of Lisp, with all of its parantheses. But the reason Lisp is
done this way is so that code is expressed in a data structure that
can be easily manipulated by Lisp, which the key to its extensibility.
If you through out the syntax of Lisp, you lose this powerful
capability. All that being said, my next personal project will
probably be in Ruby because I want to do a web application, and Rails
is too cool.

The most fun I've had programming in a professional environment was
using Smalltalk. Back then I used ParcPlace Visualworks, but now I
would recommend the Squeak implementation, which is open source. It
rates high on practicality, with strong Internet protocol and
multi-media support. From a language perspective, for someone who
knows Ruby, it is not as alternative as something like Lisp, Haskell,
or OCamel, because Ruby borrowed a lot of aspects of Smalltalk. The
main thing you will get from Smalltalk over Ruby is that it has an
even more interactive environment, where everything is at your
fingertips. Squeak does have a very alternative GUI toolkit, and an
active community of users.

The most fun I had programming in college was doing a project in
Prolog. Prolog rates very high in the alternative criteria. In Prolog
(short for Programming in Logic) your program consists of a series of
"facts" and "rules", and your program executes by running an inference
engine that attempts to "prove" a given statement based on the list of
facts and rules. Unfortunately, Prolog has not proven to be a good
general-purpose language, so it doesn't rate too high on the
practicality criteria.

Whatever you pick, I hope you enjoy yourself!

Greg


On 9/19/05, Martin DeMello <martindemello@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Robbie Carlton <robbie.carlton@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I would wholeheartedly recomend lisp.
> > It's definitely alternative
> > It's more practical than you might have heard
> 
> So practical, they even wrote a book about it :)
> 
> http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
> 
> martin
> 
>