3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
5:58 p.m.
Yeah, yeah, I know. ;-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org>
Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2012 12:12:29
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC
Depends who you
ask. I was told by a guy with 3 years of Java
programming under his belt that Java is much more powerful than
assembler, after all, Java is object oriented! ;-)
Unless he also knew a half-dozen other languages and had at least a
decade of programming experience (the ten-thousand-hour rule), I doubt
he was competent to comment on the question.
There are two meanings in which it makes sense to talk about the power
of a programming language.
One is what can be accomplished with it in theory. In this sense,
practically all languages are equivalent; you'll have to look rather
hard to find a language that's not Turing-complete. (The first example
in serious use that comes to mind is the p-code used by BPF: it
(deliberately) does not support any form of looping.)
The other is how easy the language makes it for the programmer to
express an algorithm, or a class of algorithms, of interest. In this
sense languages vary widely, and have specializations. If I get to
pick the language, then if I'm writing numerical code, it's FORTRAN.
Matrix processing? APL. Device driver? C. Expert system? Lisp.
Et cetera.
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It's not really a fair comparison as we expect a
"modern" language
to do much more than FORTRAN 66.
Do what, exactly? [...] Does the
simplest---machine code, do less
than, any HLL, modern or ancient? Is C less capable than Python?