16 Oct
2011
16 Oct
'11
11:25 a.m.
On 16/10/11 1:59 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 16 Oct 2011 at 13:23, Shoppa, Tim wrote:
Absolutely!!! This is a very important point.
Alan Perlis:
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming,
is not worth knowing."
This should be stenciled on the door of every programming office.
Language constrains and moulds thought - as George Orwell also knew and
wrote about.
via http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis
I used to be more condescending towards the
attitude that
the-whole-world-is-a-stream-of-bytes (having worked with many I/O
devices and languages and computers that had far more evolved record
concepts) but here i am in 2011 and if I can coerce anything into a
stream of bytes - I've got a lot of tools for working with that.
Unfortunately, our tools constrain our thought--and that's the evil
in a "universal" tool such as C.
Program in APL, for example, for six months and I guarantee that your
way of thinking about things will begin to change dramatically. I'm
not saying that "that Iverson language" (as one of my co-workers used
to call it) is the be-all, but its constraints on thinking are very
different from most traditional languages.
--Chuck