From: Christian Neukirchen Date: 2006-12-16T22:16:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for Kids? "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" writes: > Christian Neukirchen wrote: >> "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" writes: >> >> >>> The only language that ever changed the way I thought about >>> programming was LISP 1.5. >>> >> >> Are you sure? I learned more from every language since Lisp that >> changed my way about thinking. It has been a lot *harder* to find >> these languages, though... >> > I'm pretty sure -- I was there. :) I didn't intent to question LISP 1.5, but the significance it made. Say, compared to Scheme, LISP 1.5 is not that world-changing, is it? > But seriously, I started out as a > macro assembly language programmer, then learned FORTRAN. APL > certainly would have changed the way I thought about programming had I > been in a position to learn and use it. But I wasn't, and the next > language I learned was Lisp 1.5. After that, there wasn't a whole heck > of a lot new. FORTH maybe, except that I pretty much view FORTH as a > convoluted macro assembler. :) I thought of Forth too. Forth's biggest feature are the abstractions it makes possible, but it's biggest failure is that these leak easily. But it is an example that should be studied by every language designer. > The two languages I wish I had learned were APL and Smalltalk. I > suppose I could still learn Smalltalk, but Ruby seems a lot easier to > use -- the Squeak environment, for example, is hopelessly complicated, > not to mention visually garish. And APL seems to have vanished from > the planet. The kind of people who used to use APL, finance geeks, now > use R, which I *do* know. APL lives on as J, K and Q. I still wait for the day I get to see the K source code... it must be an amazing piece of code. Further languages that changed my way to think about programming: - Prolog (mainly the different evaluation mechanism) - Maude (mixfix syntax, meta-implementation) - Haskell (typing done right?) - Pico (http://pico.vub.ac.be/, Lua done right?) I'm sure I forgot something. -- Christian Neukirchen http://chneukirchen.org