2 May
2024
2 May
'24
2:02 p.m.
On May 2, 2024, at 6:55 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Thu, 2 May 2024 at 00:51, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
That sounds right to me.
What would our world be like if the first home computers were to have had
APL, instead of BASIC?
To be perfectly honest I think the home computer boom wouldn't have
happened, and it would have crashed and burned in the 1970s, with the
result that microcomputers remained firmly under corporate control.
I have been watching the APL world with interest since I discovered it
at university, and I still don't understand a word of it.
I've been watching Lisp for just 15 years or so and I find it unreadable too.
I think there are widely different levels of mental flexibility among
smart humans and one person's "this just requires a small effort but
you get so much in return!" is someone else's eternally impossible,
unclimbable mountain. After some 40 years in computers now, I still like
BASIC best, with
Fortran and Pascal very distant runners-up and everything else from C
to Python is basically somewhere between Minoan Linear A and Linear B
to me.
Well, Linear B isn't that hard, it's just Greek. :-)
My guess is that the languages you use routinely are the ones that work best, and which
languages those are depends on where you work and on what projects. For example, I
don't *like* C (I call it a "feebly typed language") and C++ not either, but
my job uses these two plus Python.
Now Python is actually my favorite (though recently I've done a bunch of work in
FORTH). I like to mention that, in 50 years or so, I have only encountered two
programming languages where I went from "no knowledge" to "wrote and
debugged a substantial program" in only one week -- Pascal (in graduate school) and
Python (one job ago).
paul