Women in Technology

Article:		What I Hate About Your Programming Language
Subject:		What do you hate about Forth, Lisp and APL?
Date:		2005-10-16 00:45:32
From:		znmeb
I maintain there are only half a dozen unique programming languages in the history of computing: macro assembler, FORTRAN, Lisp, APL, FORTH and SmallTalk. So ... what do you hate about those languages? Oh ... learn a new language every year? That implies someone has to come up with a decent new language every year. I'm learning Ruby right now. I go about one language every two to three years. Before Ruby it was R and before R it was Perl. I never did learn Python or PHP, and I don't really think I want to. And I don't think I want to learn any of the "theoretical" languages like Eiffel, Haskell, OCAML, etc. I'll stick with Lisp for that.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• What do you hate about Forth, Lisp and APL?
  2005-10-28 03:09:59  adrianh [View]
  
  
  <blockquote> And I don't think I want to learn any of the "theoretical" languages like Eiffel, Haskell, OCAML, etc. </blockquote>
  
  

  I really quite like Eiffel, and never really saw it as a theoretical language :-) The OO model is elegant, and Design By Contract is rather effective (although less effective than TDD in my experience.)

• What do you hate about Forth, Lisp and APL?
  2005-10-27 15:41:47  chromatic | [View]
  
  
  Hm, good question. I don't have a lot experience with macro assembler, but if you mean what I think you mean, text substitution macros just aren't fun.
  
  Forth (or PostScript, which I have written) has the problem that I never trained my brain to work in the stack-oriented way.
  
  Smalltalk is nice, but its "all of the world is an image" approach really gets in the way sometimes.
  
  I would like Lisp better if it had syntax.
  
  It's probably worth at least exploring one of the languages in your theoretical list. I've done some Haskell programming and it's a good way to expand your mind, especially with pattern matching function signatures and currying -- even if you don't get into monads or continuations. The choices for syntax annoy me in some places though.