16 Oct
2011
16 Oct
'11
10:59 a.m.
On 16 Oct 2011 at 13:23, Shoppa, Tim wrote:
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