From: Isaac Gouy <igouy@...>
Date: 2005-11-29T15:42:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Programming Newbie: Ruby or Java?

mental@rydia.net wrote:
> Quoting James Britt <james_b@neurogami.com>:
>
> > > one of the languages that they use in academia to teach
> > > programming is lisp. you might want to take a look at that too.
> > > but just to learn because doing something real in lisp is
> > > painful.
> >
> > Is this true for people who learn Lisp as their first language?
>
> They adapt to the pain -- it's mainly just syntactic.  The thing
> about Lisp is that the syntax isn't very humane, but you can
> certainly get used to it (macros are a powerful incentive to come
> to grips with it once you discover their utility).
>
> But that Lisp is actually "hard" is a myth, due mainly to the way in
> which the language is usually taught.  Syntax aside, the language is
> plenty familiar.  There's nothing magical about it.  It's just that
> most Lisp courses are taught on something of a "throw the kid in
> the deep end of the lake and he'll learn to swim real quick"
> principle.
>
> People get jittery about things like first-class functions because
> they're presented as so strange and mystical, but really they
> aren't.  What are Ruby blocks, after all?  They're just syntactic
> sugar for lambdas.
>
> Ruby is a sly little victory for functional programming, actually.
> I mean, what if you told someone that a language had no for loops,
> and that instead you had to get by by passing functions to iterator
> primitives?
>
> "How can I do anything useful without for loops?!" they would say.
> That's a common objection to Scheme, actually (never mind that
> Scheme actually does have 'do', which is the same thing).  At that
> point many Scheme advocates start talking about recursion, and
> people's heads explode.
>
> But then Ruby showed people it was okay.

Smalltalk?

> We don't normally use recursion, but then again neither does
> well-written Scheme code for the most part.  In functional
> languages when you need recursion you usually want to reserve it
> for implementing little combinators (of which 'map', 'loop' and
> 'each' are simple examples) and then build on top of those.
> 
> -mental